Lighting a Heineken Bottle

Today I was learning how to light a bottle properly. For Rontgen to know what to do in case I have to do it for a client. Prefer to refine things before I have to do the actual work. Anyway, I had tried this with a Jack Daniels bottle before here, and I wanted to see if I could do it a bit different with a Heineken bottle this time round.

I started with one light to see what it would look like and thenbuild on that. This is what it looked like.

Not bad for starters. I concluded I may only need two lights for this setup. Also needed a background that didn't involve the walls of my apartment. So I throw in a white sheet of manilla and throw the speedlite behind it. I gets this.

Sure I killed the plastic container it was standing on but i thought this was also pretty good for just one light. So let's try both sets of speedlites now. One below and one behind the bottle.

Better I think. But I want to kill the overexposed bottle at the bottom and get rid of the grey and white area distinction. I'll solve this by lowering my shooting position to the level of the container it's sitting on and increase the flash behind the paper to give me a completely white background. [Looking at this now. I think I had already thrown in the softbox above.]

So now we've lowered the camera position and changed the look of the bottle just a bit. think I prefer this perspective in fact. Feels like I'm looking up to the mighty Heineken. Anyway. I didn't like the shine at the bottom of the previous one so I tried killing the flash with cards so that only a little light got into the bottle. Worked enough for me though I intend to add green ice to the setup so a little bit of overexposure at the bottom won't hurt. Now we wait for the green ice and the beads of sweat from an ice cold heineken. No one drinks look warm beer....

(A few days later)

So I tried the green ice cubes. Turns out I made them too dark. I will try this shot again but with lighter ice cubes. Perhaps made out of lime juice and not green paint. Here's the shot. I don't like it. Let's see what the lime juice option will look like on Friday.