Studio Still Life Photography

In a lecture hosted Tom Brannigan, we learnt how to set up and take images of objects, particularly for advertising.
For this, we were asked to take a photo of something reflective, something with a logo and something transparent. For my images, I chose a perfume bottle sitting on its box with an iridescent makeup palette leaning behind it.

In order to get the perfect image, it's important to take more than one photo, each one with different lighting. This is to ensure that you can focus on one part of the subject and get the best out of it and then can compile the images into one to make one whole image with all elements looking good. If I were to take just one photo, it's likely that certain elements of the image wouldn't look as good as they could have.
When using this technique it's important that the camera and the subject stay in the exact same spot. The only things that should be moving are the lights.

First, I set up the backdrop. This was simply a very large soft box as the background and a white piece of foam board for the base on white my objects would sit upon, and another piece to lean against the background soft box as to ensure the light emitted wasn't too harsh. This is to create a pure white background. The three lights facing the subjects could be turned on and off to achieve a particular effect however the main large softbox always remained on.

I used a digital medium format Hasselblad camera, tethered to an apple mac computer. We then used Phocus, the Hasselblad software, to shoot and examine the images as we were going along. I found this software incredibly helpful, particularly for finding out if the focus is perfect. This is because of the much larger screen compared to that on the back of the camera. We could also press the capture button from the computer to shoot rather than pressing the button on the camera and risking moving it, despite it being on a very heavy and stale tripod. We simply wanted to eliminate all risks of the camera moving.

I first exposed for the box. This was my first point of call as it seemed easiest to evenly light while I become familiar with this set up. I had two medium sized bowens lights without soft boxes either side of the box, as well as one light with a softbox straight on to the box. This created a really even light throughout, meaning there were no harsh shadows falling on the box. I was really happy with how the logo turned out because it was really evenly lit and easily readable.

I then wanted to focus on the bottle. I started with the glass body.

This is the image I chose to be the base of my bottle. It shows a pretty transparency, it shows the glass, reflections and the indents well. As you can see, the logo on the box isn't as flat in tone anymore because I moved the lights to expose for the glass, which is why we make a composite image. While the bottle in this image looks nice, it wasn't perfect so I resumed with experimenting with my lighting.

In this image I exposed it to make the edges darker as the first image had a lot of highlight, and I wanted the bottle to stand out a little more rather than blend in to the rest of the image; it needed to be the focus point.

This image was to create more definition around the  indents of the bottle to draw attention to them. I wanted the bottle to have a really strong presence in the image, and this is caused by giving the image more contrast and depth. the highlight around the edge of the ridge of the bottle is what made me want to use this image.

After I was happy with the bottle components, I started focussing on the cap. I wanted it to look sleek and full of contrast to make the image look more high end and professional. By using two lights either side of the cap without a soft box straight on, I was able to get two strong reflections in the metal part, cause a good amount of contrast. This adds depth to the image.

For this image, I actually took it to try having just the one reflection in the base of the cap, however when I was editing I ended up using those solely for the top of the cap, as it had been rather blown out in the previous images. Getting the reflections in helps add depth to the top of the cap. To make the edges well defined, at this point we had to use a black fill on the side and above the bottle. This allowed for the black to also reflect into the glass and therefore create a dark outline, as you can see on the left hand side. Without this it would have blended into the background far too much.

This ended up being the image I used for the metal part of the cap. I again used a black fill for a more intense contrast, while only using one light facing the bottle. This creates one strip of light going down the bottle cap. It's not too different from the image above this, really, however we used a bit more black fill on this image. The metal of the bottle cap isn't pristine in texture, with scratches and marks all over it however this can be fixed in photoshop.

This is the final image from this shoot. Here I focused on the palette behind the perfume bottle because it hadn't been in perfect focus in the other images. Here, I made sure it was in focus and used three lights facing the palette to really show the iridescent properties it has. As a result, it's well lit and has a number of colours in it.


If I were to reshoot this I would have tried some focus stacking. This would ensure that everything in my image was incredibly sharp. I would achieve this by focusing at the very front of the image, shooting, and moving the focus a little further back. I'd repeat this until I had reached the back of the image, and then used a programme called Helicon Focus, which puts all the in focus part of the images together for you to create one perfectly focused image, Unfortunately this is not available on the university computers. It is possible to achieve this with masks in photoshop which is how i'll be putting together the images I shot to make sure they're in focus, however this would be a lot more effort especially with proper focus stacking.