Not Many People Know This, But...
I haven't always exlcusively done outdoor and adventure imagery.
If you’ve checked out my website, you’ll know.
Otherwise?
Well, you now know.
Even though landscape and outdoor lifestyle photography is my first love, it wasn’t what I did to pay the bills for a long time.
What was?
Product imagery.
Or more specifically wine (and related alcoholic beverage) product photography.
It was a function of two things, essentially:
I had to pay the bills
I lived in the heart of the South African wine region (Stellenbosch)
So, I taught myself product photography.
Now, even though I was good at photography already, product photgraphy is a whole other animal altogether.
It’s more like black magic, some would say.
It consists of endless experimentation to find what works for a specific genre (wine / glass / reflective objects in this case), refining it so you have an advantage in your niche, then scaling by building a client base.
Black magic?
Indeed.
You see, reflective objects like glass (wine / gin bottles etc.) are notoriously difficult to photograph.
You need to be familiar with light modifiers:
soft boxes
strip lights
spots
scrims
gobos
fill light
negative fill light
As well as the properties of light:
the inverse square law
specular highlights
soft light
hard light
edge light
feathered ligth
And how they ineract.
Then there’s the post production / editing.
Take the image up top, for instance.
You think that’s one image?
Nope.
It’s roughly seven different images combined:
One for the gin bottle glass
One for the label
One for the glass
One for the glass logo
One for the garnish
One for the shadows (mucho importante)
One for the gin bottle cork / finish
You see, in product photography you often photograph only certain aspects of an image optimally and then combine them in post (the editing phase) to make that perfect image.
Why?
A few reasons.
The biggest being budget, really.
You could spend days and thousands of $$$ building out a set to get everything right in camera (and that’s what we did back in the film days).
Or, due to the advantages of digitial, you can photograph isolated aspects of an image and combine them in post as if they were photographed in one go.
Much less $.
Much happier client, too.
Bigger profit margins, as well (if you know what you’re doing).
That’s it for this week!
Any interesting stories or thoughts to add?
Simply hit reply and let me know / comment below (so we can all benefit).
Have a great week!
—
Until next time ✌🏽.
Cornelius
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Or simply just buying me a whiskey here.
So fascinating, I did not know that about you. Thanks for showing us the BTS process.