More Still Life Lighting

"Don't Cry Over Spilled Booze"

"Let's Eat!"

Hope everyone is enjoying this holiday season.  Here’s a shorter than usual blog due to the holidays…I’m still waiting to get my presents, but I think the beer and sandwich may be it this year.  Since I was feeling pretty lazy this past week, and didn’t take down the set from my last booze shots, I thought  I’d take advantage of the situation.  I shot something like the “Spilled Booze” shot over twenty years ago, but I can’t find the image so I figured I’d shoot it again.  I just laid the glass on it’s side, positioned the ice cubes, and then added the liquid.  On a shot like this, I would normally use a “turkey baster” to place the liquid where I wanted it, but I couldn’t find it, so I used a straw to suck some of the liquid out of the container and “spit it out” on the set.  Maybe that was too much information, but sometimes you just have to make do.  Do yourselves a favor and buy a “turkey baster”…you’ll thank me for that little tidbit of information.  O.K. onto the lighting.  As you can see from the behind the scenes image, the light mainly comes from underneath.  I have a gridded reflector with a piece of diffusion material just draped over it.  The surface is three layers.  The glass is resting on a rippled piece of plexi.  Second one down is my  ”smoked plexi” that I showed you in previous blogs, and the bottom one is a plain milky white piece of plexi…same as any light table.  I have my overhead silk right over the set and my diffused softbox above that. That top light is turned down so low, that after editing my images, I came to the conclusion that a piece of white foamcore or artist board would probably be just as good.  Anyhow, that how I lit it.

The second shot in the fridge was lit with a Nikon SB800 programmed to SU-4, so it would fire when the main light fired.  The main light was a diffused ring-light made by Paul Buff.  A ring light doesn’t have any shadows since your lens comes right through the hole in the center.  For the “behind the scenes” shot, I cheated the ring-light over so you could see what it looks like.  Anyhow, with the Nikon strobe on the bottom, and the ring-light lighting the set straight on, and the set being a “white box”, there was a lot of light there.  I even put a white card behind the featured beer bottle to bounce some light back through the beer, and also to block out any of the fridge wall from showing through…gives a nice clean look.  Last but not least, I want to draw your attention to the illustrative look of these two shots…especially the fridge/beer image.  Barbara at LucisArt had a Christmas special on her software.  This was my first favorite software program that I used years ago.  Unfortunately, she stopped producing it for us Mac users and when I got my new intel iMac, I couldn’t transfer my old version over.  Well, long story short, she’s making it for Mac users once again, and these were my first two images produced with LucisArt 3…I guess this was my Christmas present after all!  Take a look now at the “behind the scenes” shots.

"Spilled Booze "behind the scenes"

"Fridge & Beer behind the scenes"

See you next year…Happy New Year!

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