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That Glossy Look
How do you get that glossy, reflective look that is pretty popular now-a-days? How do you get a cleanly blown out background? These are some of the questions we’ll go over today.
The reflective foreground is really popular recently, and I think it’s due to Apple’s advertising, and the popularity of their iTunes coverflow view. I wondered how hard it was to get this look. I started out by researching what materials you could use that would produce a nice reflection. Glass, Plexiglass, and tileboard all came to mind. Glass seems like the natural choice, but here are a few issues I had with it. First off, it’s glass, so it could break easily and be a real mess. Secondly, I’ve seen, where at the right angles, you get a slight double reflection (from both sides of the glass). I wanted a really clean reflection, so that option was out. Next was tileboard. These are big 4′x8′ sheets of particle board that have a shiny reflective surface. You can get them at home centers, and they are often used as paneling in wet areas (think utility room). They are cheap, which is good, but they are really big and heavy. Maybe if I was shooting full length portraits and wanted a reflecting surface, but for small product shots, it’s just too much to deal with. I finally decided on Plexiglass. A 3′x4′ sheet was around $25, so it’s reasonable, and it produces a really shinny surface. The only down-side to Plexiglass is that it scratches easily, so I’ll have to be careful with it.
Now that I have a nice surface to get a good reflection on, I turned my attention to getting a nice, white background. This is useful if you’re doing shots for catalog or web presentation. I also wanted a result that took very little to no Photoshop post production to get that white background. The key to achieving this is to light your background and subject separately. I tried two different methods, so here are the setups I tried.
In the first setup, I took a white paper backdrop and hung it from a background stand about 6′ from a table. The table had a sheet of white paper with Plexiglass upon it, with the subject positioned about 3/4 back on the table. I then placed two speedlights at 45 degree angles to the backdrop between the table and the background. Each light was aimed at the further edge of the backdrop. So, the right speedlight was aimed at the left edge of the backdrop, and the left speedlight was aimed at the right edge of the backdrop. I figured this would ensure even illumination across the entire backdrop. The speedlights that I used are zoomable, so they were set at 35mm. That seemed to produce the most even illumination while not needing to have the speedlights set at 1/2+ power (for faster recycle times and to conserve batter life). I think ideally, I should have used umbrellas with a gobo placed in between them and the camera so that they don’t influence exposure. I metered each flash individually until they were 2 stops overexposed. This is important because any more powerful and the subject might look washed out due to the amount of light reflecting back off of the background. A really strong reflectance, or ‘wrap’ as it’s called, will also blow out fine detail like hair if using this technique for doing portrait work. The softboxes were then placed quite close to the subject, and were set at a 1:1 lighting ratio. Here’s a diagram and the sample image.
Very little work was done to this shot. All I did was to remove the visible transition from table top to background, and I faded the reflection. Two very minor and very easy corrections. I think if this was a real ‘production’ shot, I would have used less reflection, and spent more time removing the slight color influence on the table surface from the Plexiglass.
In this second example, the background, table, and softboxes were the same, but I used a single snooted SB700 (see diagram below). I used a short snoot (about 1″) to block any stray light from hitting the subject. I also set the background to be 1.5 stops overexposed so that there was a bit of tonality to it, and the softboxes were set at a 2:1 lighting ratio.
The only adjustment that I did to this shot was to blend the table to background transition.
I’d like to take another moment to talk about the metering of these shots. I found it extremely helpful to have a hand-held light meter for these shots. I’m sure that I could have got similar results without one, but I think that it would have taken longer. The only real downside (and an upside for other reasons) is that I had to meter each light separately, and it wasn’t initially obvious how to do that since I was mixing speedlights and monolights. Once I figured it out, it was a cinch, and made getting proper exposure effortless.
So what were my exposure settings? The camera’s shutter speed was set at 1/250. Shutter speed has little effect in studio work unless you’re trying to balance ambient light. I wasn’t, but I did want to make sure that no stray light was polluting my images (I was working in a garage after all). I could have set it to 1/500 as that’s my camera’s synch speed (the maximum shutter speed with which the shutter and strobes can synch). I then choose f8 as my aperture because that allowed sufficient depth of field. So, I set both softboxes to have proper exposure at f8. The background strobes were set to 2 stops overexposed, f16. What do I mean by “set the strobe to f8″? Well, I think that should be a separate post if anyone is interested.
Lighting Glass
Glass can be a pretty tricky thing to photograph, especially if you’re trying to accentuate the shape of the glass itself. For most product photography you’ll have your lights in front of the subject, maybe on a 45 degree angle, casting even light on the front of your subject. If you did that for something made solely of glass, it would get lost in the background and look really flat and lifeless.
To illustrate my point, I decided to take some shots of a bedside water carafe that I have. The point of this shoot would be to accentuate the shape of the glass in an artistic manner. Maybe not the best product shot if you were trying to sell these, but a good start I think.
The first example uses ‘dark-field lighting’. In this technique, you place the light source directly behind the subject, then obscure some of it with an opaque material (like black foam core or dark cloth). What happens is that the edges of the glass object are defined by highlight, while the majority of the glass object remains dark. You can also control the amount of highlight by moving the object closer (more highlight) or further (less highlight) from the light source. In the example below I was using a 36″x36″ softbox with a piece of black construction paper down the middle. The carafe was about 18″ from the softbox. No other lights were used.
My second example uses ‘bright-field lighting’. This technique is very similar to the above, except you place two opaque material on each side of your light source, revealing only a narrow slit of light (obviously not so narrow that it’s in the shot though). What happens here is that the edges are defined by shadow, while the majority of the glass object remains bright. You can also control the amount of shadow by moving the object closer (less shadow) or further (more shadow) from the light source. In the below example I was using that same 36″x36″ softbox, but I had two strips of black construction paper along the edges of the softbox. The carafe was about 12″ away from the softbox.
Given these two examples, I think that I prefer the bright-field lighting. An alternative shot that I would have liked to do would be to take the cup off the top of the carafe and place it in front of and to the right of the carafe. I think that would look interesting as well.
Which shot do you prefer, and why?
Lighting Ratios
Yea, what are lighting ratios all about? 1:1, 2:1, 8:1, etc, etc, etc. When I first came across these, they didn’t make much sense to me, but I’ve been playing around with flash lighting for the past week, and it’s much clearer now.
One thing you really need is a flash meter, or a multi-meter that also has flash metering abilities. I have a Gossen Luna Pro F. It’s pretty old, but seems to work well. I use it mainly for meter when shooting with my Mamiya RZ67. That camera does not have a meter, so you need an external device (or, you can buy the AE Prism Finder). Any way, I’ve always used it in either reflective or incident modes, never as a flash meter. My suggestion is to RTFM, and actually remember it. I read the manual a while ago, and forgot a few key points on how to use it in flash metering mode. I managed to slowly remember them, but perhaps a quick review of the manual would have been in order. 
OK, so back to lighting ratios. This is basically the difference in relative lighting strengths between two light sources. It could even be the difference between the light reflected off of something, like a reflector of some sort. If we’re using F-stop as the indicator of difference, the ratio would be 2^<f-stop difference>:1. Lets use some examples, as I find that easier to understand myself:
0 stop difference = 2^0 = 1:1 lighting ratio
1 stop difference = 2^1 = 2:1 lighting ratio
2 stop difference = 2^2 = 4:1 lighting ratio
3 stop difference = 2^3 = 8:1 lighting ratio
Does that make sense? Perhaps some examples will further illustrate the difference.
1:1 Lighting Ratio
An even amount of illumination from both sides of the flower. Notice that there are very little shadows, and that features don’t really stand out due to the lack of contrast.
2:1 Lighting Ratio
In this image, the left side is one stop under exposed. Shadows are a little more pronounced, and the image has a better ‘feel’ to it since there is a more natural feeling to the lighting.
4:1 Lighting Ratio
In this image, the left side is 2 stops under exposed. The monolight to the left was turned off, so the only light coming from that side was the light bouncing off the left softbox when the right monolight fired. I measured this by pointing the light meter to the left, and firing the right monolight. The meter reading indicated that the reflected light was 2 stops under exposed. The shadows are quite pronounced in this image, but still not too dark. This would be good for a moody scene.
I hope this gives you a better understanding of lighting ratios.
