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Perfume Photography
By Irakly Shanidze
Along with watches, fragrance bottles are one of the most challenging objects in product photography. Before even
starting to think about the best vantage point and visual harmony of a photograph-to-be, you have to deal with
quite annoying technical issues.
- Little glass bottles are transparent, yet reflective. It means that bad reflections must be eliminated,
while good ones (those revealing a shape of the bottle) should stay where they need to be. "What's the big deal?" -
you may ask. "Just light it from behind and create contour reflections with those nifty little white cards
installed laterally". Well, this may be a solution for a goblet, but fragrance manufacturers have a nasty habit
of placing all kinds of words and logos on their bottles. It brings us right to the issue #2.
- While logos and names are so important for brand recognition, for photographers they are nothing but trouble.
It is not that bad if they are black, but white and especially reflective ones require special attention. In our
case, dealing with this issue was especially challenging because artwork was partially painted over gold plating.
- When you eventually managed to tame all reflections and shed enough light on all relevant information on the
bottle, the third issue comes to play. It is color fidelity, which is so important in product photography and proves
to be more than just a complex task sometimes. The bad news is that in photographing fragrances, this task is
especially tantalizing. You have to make sure that both glass and liquid inside and whatever is written on the
bottle are of correct colors. Again, you may say "What prevents you from using light sources of the same color
temperature?" Well, duh… Everybody knows this, even I do. But what if you need to use color gels for the background
and accent lights? How to isolate the bottle from getting tainted with unwanted colors? The good news, however, is
that with advent of digital photography, color fidelity became somewhat easier to achieve.
As all bottles are unique, and there is no panacea in dealing with them. Every lighting set-up is made to accommodate intricacies of the bottle and to make it look like no other. That's why small product photography is an endeavor of constant problem solving, creating makeshift devices and structures and coming up with unique lighting solutions.
Let's discuss how problems listed and not listed above can be overcome using a photo on Fig. 1 as an example.
The perfume to be photographed was from a Lolita Lempicka collection. Made from lavender-colored glass, it looked like an unevenly shaped apple with gold plated name and ivy leaves. Leaf details were also partially painted over gold. To make it even worse, a gold-plated stopper was bark textured. All in all, it was an intricate, beautiful piece made to entice women and frighten photographers of both genders.
I placed the bottle on a Foba medium product table with matte white translucent surface. For precise control of shadows and reflections that were of paramount importance in this shot, instead of flashes I decided to work with continuous light sourses. I put a 600W modeling light of a Broncolor Minipuls C80, which is a 3200K source at full power, behind and below the table at about 45 towards the table. A standard P70 reflector with a 20 grid and a piece of Bogen magenta gel produced a spot of necessary size and color.
I used the second light source to transilluminate the bottle. In order to concentrate light into a narrow beam, a poster board with a small circular hole was taped to the bottom of the table. A Xenon daylight balanced flashlight was clamped to a small light stand right below the hole and angled towards a camera. Then I carefully moved the bottle with the light spot until the glass was lit to my liking, and some light spilled behind the bottle. At that point, I had a brightly lit bottle on a violet background. Letters on the bottle looked dead black, and overall composition did not look too exciting.
In order to bring Lolita's handwriting to life and to give the picture some drama, I used yet another active light source. It happened to be a household halogen flashlight with color temperature of approximately 3200K. I focused the flashlight very close and placed its head on a piece of Silly Putty. I kept changing its vertical and horizontal angles until four things happened: there was no reflection of the light source anywhere in a viewfinder, all letters, the leaf and the stopper were evenly lit, a spill from the flashlight appeared to the left of the bottle, and a heart-shaped shadow became tangent with the spill. After that I taped the flashlight to the table with masking tape.
The rest was pretty easy. I shot this picture at f/8 in aperture priority mode with one and a half stop compensation in RAW format. Later, having the bottle in front of me I adjusted color temperature in Adobe Raw Converter to 4010K to achieve correct color balance on the bottle. "Perfumes Lolita Lempicka Paris" logo was shot separately, knocked out and added to the photograph in Adobe Photoshop
Equipment used:
Contax 645AF
Contax 4/120 Makro-Planar T*
Kodak DCS ProBack 645c
Lexar 80x 4GB CF card
Irakly Shanidze Bio
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