Shooting a Bottle with ONE Continuous Light and a Smartphone

hey so i'm going to show you how i got this shot using just my iphone and one continuous light it's been a while hasn't it so i recently came across this instagram account of this guy who makes reals and i think he's also big on tick tock he may be on tik tok and just repurpose his content for reals not too sure but what he does is he takes these funny videos of like over complicated tutorials or hacks like if you were to watch the original videos and it's pretty obvious that you know these creators are taking unnecessarily complicated approaches to a simple task and what this guy does is he plays these videos first and then he shows himself doing the same hack or task but in a super simple and obvious kind of way so seeing his version after the original makes you think well of course you would do it the easy way anyway it's just common sense so basically the idea behind his videos is to show how ridiculous the original hack uh videos are it's the exaggeration of the common sense that well at least made it funny for me i don't know about you but okay you're probably wondering well what does this have anything to do with lighting or the picture that you were going to show us how to create well what i really appreciated was the concept behind his videos and that's to keep things simple and coming across those videos i thought this is a great example of how to approach lighting in food and still life photography because i think at some point or another we can tend to over complicate things either in our heads or on the chute without really meaning to and i know i do this a lot and according to some of the feedback i got from you guys i'm sure you can relate as well so simply put the idea behind this video is approaching lighting with simplicity and there's just something really appealing and attractive about that kind of approach or attitude and in the end i want to try to demonstrate that in this video [Music] all right so i need a surface to place the bottle on obviously so i'm going to use my sawhorses place a surface on top of it and then we'll place a white plexiglass on top of that as well so of course you can use other means of which to sit the bottle on top i want to use sawhorses because this specific kind or model has these little divots right here and this is where i'll be able to place my background at an angle which will be very important to the overall exposure and if that doesn't make any sense to you i'll show you why right now actually so the next is the background for this i just placed a c-stand with a boom arm raised up behind the surface and then took this white trifold fill card and placed it in these little grooves on the sawhorses which i just mentioned earlier and it should hold the card in place now i have it set at an angle with respect to the surface because i simply want the background to have a gradient to it when i place the light near the edge of the set because this edge of the background will be closer to the light it will appear brighter and as we move towards the top of the frame the exposure should gradually fall off so that it has this subtle gradient across the background which will ultimately give more what's called tonal range in the photo rather than just having you know the background completely white so i believe in doing this having that gradient adds more depth to the photo next is the camera placement i simply attached my phone to a phone clamp and attached it to my tripod like so made sure to get the tripod low enough so that the camera would be just below eye level while also taking advantage using the reflection of the bottle via the plexiglas which i think adds some production value as well and plus it saves me time trying to recreate it in photoshop now for lighting i placed another c-stand next to the surface i used my rosco tough white diffusion roll and made sure it was flush up against the edge of the surface then i just attached my sl60w to a light stand attached a small strip box to it placed it roughly six to eight inches from the diffusion paper and angled it slightly towards the camera then i just set the light to full brightness so the reason why i chose a strip box was because of its shape and that's important because my subject is very reflective and will reflect whatever shape my light source ends up being if i didn't use a modifier for example the reflection would show as a hot spot on the bottle which i ultimately didn't want and using the strip box on the other hand i'm able to reflect the size and shape of that strip box alongside of the bottle which i think complements the bottle more nicely than the single hotspot did another thing to keep in mind is where i placed this light with respect to the subject i want that reflection to be placed on the bottle in such a way that it complements the label if i place the strip box too far to the front that reflection would distract from the label put it too far back the label and even the overall tonal variation of the picture changes so finding that right spot for the light is crucial in this case alright and if i take the shot right now the right side is going to be dark and it is and i'm sure you already know it's because there's no reflected light bouncing back in so because of that of course i'm gonna have to add in some fill light and for that i'm gonna use my large v-flat and place it rather close to the set like so and if you're wondering well what if i don't have a large v-flat could i just use you know a small foam board instead yes you definitely can and i think the result will be pretty similar the reason i use a large v-flat is because the large surface area of the v-flat allows light to be filled in but still preserves the quality of the shadows if that makes sense i think that's really important to understand it's because i can place this relatively far away from the subject but still have the fill card big enough to have light bounce in the shadow areas without eliminating the shadows completely now compare that to if i were to simply place a foam board which you can totally do next to the subject it may risk the photo coming out completely flat because of how close i would have to get it so i hope that makes sense the app i used for this was the lightroom camera app and my settings were iso 100 f 2.2 and 1 120th of a second and in terms of knowing what settings to use all i did was put the light at a hundred percent and then make sure my iso was as low as it can go without having to slow down my shutter speed too much so for example if i went to my phone's lowest iso setting which i believe is iso 40 then i would need to drop my shutter speed to a pretty slow speed and that could cause problems because this phone clamp isn't the most stable it actually wiggles very easily as you can see so in this case the sweet spot was at iso 100 and 1 120 of a second all right then all i have to do is make sure the bottle is aligned set a 10 second timer on the app and then take the picture okay so i know it doesn't look like much straight out of camera it actually does look a little dark or underexposed but i purposely underexposed it because i didn't want to blow out this strip of highlight on the bottle which totally would have happened had i upped the exposure just a little bit more so that when i take it into post since i was also able to preserve the shadows with the v-flat i could brighten up the overall exposure of the entire image while attempting to balance the exposures across the bottle from this highlight to the shadow region on the right side of the bottle and that's essentially how i came to this final shot if there's anything i want you to take away from this video it's this it's to not make lighting more complicated than it needs to be now that doesn't mean that your lighting setups have to be boring it means that when you're trying to figure out how to light something in a particular way and are having trouble with it just remember to keep it simple and i found that the most creative photographs that i've made were because i would constantly keep it as simple as i can and more often than not you may realize that the more simple the method the much more pleasing the results may turn out to be all right and by the way yes i'm back contrary to several comments that i've received on some of my videos that asked if i was dead or alive here i am now i could probably annoy you with all the details but that would most likely be a waste of time so rather i'm just going to tell you that i'm back and i also want to say thank you thank you for sticking around and supporting this channel and especially those of you who personally reached out to me either through email or instagram or on in my youtube comments i really do appreciate that so thank you alright well thanks for watching i hope you are doing well and i'll see you next time

Channel: figandlight

Views: 466,279

Keywords: product photography tutorial, product photography lighting, how to light a bottle, product photography tips, how to photograph a bottle, product photography one light, product photography at home, product photography lighting techniques, product photography white background, product photography with phone, product photography with iphone, food product photography tutorial, iphone 12 pro max, iphone food photography, smartphone product photography, smartphone food photography

Id: AKXwJbZ7kXQ

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021