Perfume Part One

For the second half of my project I am going to be shooting perfume bottles, I have chosen this because I am interested in trying to imitate a commercial style brief in which I would create work for a client. I think that working with perfumes gives me unlimited creativity and possibilities as each perfume brand is different and would require a different atmosphere and theme.

For my first shoot I have taken a few bottles into the studio and practiced being able to correctly light them. I think that the shoot was a success because a few of the problems I ran into I managed to overcome.

My Outcomes

 These was taken with two softboxes, one on either side of the bottle. The bottle is stood on a sheet of glass which has black card underneath so that the reflection is visible, I think the reflection adds to the photograph because without it the bottle would appear to be floating in mid air.I do not the reflections in the bottom of the bottle and I would need to rearrange my lighting in order to get rid of this.

Being able to light this bottle was quite difficult because the whole bottle is made of glass so the reflections were difficult to get rid off. I managed to solve this by rearranging the bottle so that it did not reflect the soft box light. Another problem with lighting this bottle was that underneath did not get the light hitting it and angling the reflector was difficult because I could not find one small enough to work properly.

This is another bottle that is made of glass, this was more difficult to light because the writing was on the front yet the patterned lines are on the back and these show through more than the writing even though the DoF is only wide enough for the front of the bottle to be in focus. Another problem is that the lights caused parts of the bottle to be blown out and this is very distracting, I could not manage to completely get these to disappear and this will need more work.

In magazine adverts typically there are multiple perfumes on one page so I wanted to try being able to light multiple bottles at once. In the first picture the bottle of Beyonce Heat did not light as I'd hoped I'd be able too so I changed it to a bottle of "Intimately Beckham" this lit much better. I used a black silk cloth as the background and placed different sized boxes underneath to change the heights of the bottles as I prefer this to just a line of bottles.

The photograph on the left was taken with having the glass placed on two saw horses and lighting the bottle with a snoot placed on a floor stand pointing up at the bottle, I was using a reflector to try and fill in some of the light when I accidentally caught it in the shot as I dropped it trying to press the shutter at the same time as holding it, I like the shadow in the photograph although I will need to improve on the outcome. The second photograph was taken by two softboxes on either side because I was trying to improve on the coloured shadow from the first image.

I took these with the box in so I could add something extra to the photograph, I used black pieces of card in front of the softboxes to try and remove the glares however this just made the photograph get darker and the flashes were already on full power.