Professional Product Photography With One Light

Mail time. Now that's one fine-looking bottle of bourbon from Four Roses. Thank you very much. There's a little letter here. Hello, Scather. We hope this bottle finds you well. And inspires more of your beautiful work. Well, thank you first off for sending this over, and second, I think it might just do that. All right. I've been wanting to do a one light challenge for a while now because I know a lot of you don't have a studio filled with three to four strobes, a bunch of modifiers and all that good stuff, so you might be a little apprehensive when it comes to making product photography. But if you have one light, a single strobe, and a couple of modifiers, I think you can make some really beautiful looking beverage photos. So I have a nice looking bottle here. I got my single light in the background. Let's do this. Okay, first you got to get rid of this back label right here. And that will just really allow the light to come through the bottle and make it glow, and then I'll try my best to remove all the fingerprints, dust, and you know really clean it up, and then try not to touch it after I place it on the table. Now I'm going for a little wooden scene here, something rustic. I'm thinking wooden barrel-like, you know, smoky, maybe use some props to show in an environment. But mainly focused on this nice bottle here. It's always good to have a couple other props on hand. I got some old cutting boards. Definitely gonna be using this fake ice and a glass to pour my bourbon in. You know, old set of binoculars, old compass. Never know what's gonna work and what's gonna fit in the frame, but we'll see what goes. Since I only have a single light to work with, I want to make sure I have a nice game plan set up first. That way, you know, I have everything kind of mapped out in my mind before I start moving everything around. The only thing I really know for sure right now is that I want to make sure this bottle bounces off of this background. So I'm gonna drop the bottle here on the third of the frame with the label pointed this way. Then I'm gonna try to hit this beautiful curved edge of the bottle right here, the wooden cap and the label all at once with my very first light. Then I'm gonna move the light on over to the right hand side and try to capture a nice reflection on this large flat area. Now, the light that I'm gonna be using for my one light challenge is my Elinchrom 500 watt studio strobe with large softbox. Now, to get that curved edge, the wooden cap and the label all at once, I think raising it up above the bottle and then angling it down a bit will work really nicely. But let's jump over and kick off the very first image of my one light challenge. Just to take a quick look at this image, this very first image, I'm really loving how that light is hitting the edge and then trickling down the side of the bottle there. It's looking pretty sweet. And I also like the light on the cap and the label as well. Everything's looking pretty awesome. You know, there are just a few more things that I, you know, want to build up in this image before I move the light here. You know, the reflection on the side of the bottle, it kind of fades off a little too quickly for me. I wish it went all the way down the edge of the bottle here. So I'm going to create another reflection with this white card, take another photo, and I think I'll be able to blend those two nicely together later on. There's just two more things that I want to do to spice up this nice bourbon shot before I move that light. And the first one is to apply a little whiskey styling trick that's just going to make the inside of this bottle glow. And that's to use this cheap golden paper. And that's going to reflect the light, bounce it through the bottle and make it oh so yummy. Now to prop it up, I'm going to use my specialized propping mechanism here and just place that behind the bottle and then angle it ever so slightly towards the light. Well, the second thing that I want to do is actually bounce some of that light off of this large diffuser that I have right here. And this will reflect into the right hand side of the bottle, giving a subtle reflection, not too much, not enough to take away from our main light source, but enough just to make it really smooth and blend nicely with this golden reflector that we have pumping through the bottle. Now I've moved the light to the right hand side here behind the diffuser, and I've tilted it ever so slightly outward. That way you get a nice gradient across the face of that glass. I've gotten the gold reflector out of there. And hey, wait for it. We're almost done. I think for this shot, I'm really going for the cap and this sliver of highlight that really defines the edge of the bottle shape. Okay, the last shot is to hit this background with some beautiful light. Now I'm going to get rid of that softbox and swapping that out for a gridded snoot. Now I'm going to angle this in from the left hand side, just making a sliver of light across that background. Personally, I like to prop the scene after I make the image of the bottle. I know it adds a couple of extra steps. You got to move the lights around again, but it really ensures that you don't have any crazy reflections going on in your bottle. And the last thing that you want mucking up your fine bottle of bourbon here is some weird reflections. Well, the one light challenge is finished and I'd have to say it was pretty challenging. I mean, the big difference between shooting with three to four lights and say one light is that with one light, you can only see the reflections on one side of the bottle. The other side of the bottle is completely dark, but with three to four lights, you can see everything in real time. And I would say that's the major advantage of having multiple lights with multiple modifiers. But regardless whether you're shooting with one light or with a studio filled with lights, you're going to be doing all of the heavy lifting of putting it all together inside of Photoshop. Now, I don't want you to die sitting through the hours of Photoshop here. If you want to learn more about compositing beverage photos, then check out my short course. I'll place a link in the description. However, I do want to show you a couple of cool tricks. I'll start out with my very first image here with a nice light on the edge there. Now, I'm going to blend this image with the white card image so that the light continues down the side of the bottle. I'll create a layer mask and then I'll press command I to invert this mask. This is a nifty little trick. It's nothing that special, but it'll save you a ton of time. Instead of masking out the entirety of the image, like say from this gold reflector image, I'm only going to mask in what I do want. With my brush tool B on the keyboard, I'll start bringing in that awesome color. If you want to check out what was in the photo again, you can left click on the mask and click disable layer mask. Just nerding out here. You know, it's like putting a puzzle back together again one piece at a time. There are the big areas of the photo like the gold here, but sometimes when you're five or six or even 10 photos deep, there's all these little details, these little surprises in each photo, like the light coming through these roses. I like to jot those little details on a notepad when I'm shooting. That way I can remember them when I get back to the computer. Now the photo with the light on the right hand side, I'm going to show you another little layer trick here. Because the image is pretty much black everywhere except for where the light is hitting the bottle, I can turn this layer mode from normal to lighten, and it will only show my highlights. Now when I go to make the mask, invert it again, I can brush in this layer without having to worry about bringing in that dark background. See, I'm brushing here, but nothing is happening. Pretty cool, I mean, one to remember, especially if you're shooting on an entirely black background. All right, there is our one light bottle shot. We started with the edge, added the white card, then the gold and the diffuser, then the light on the right hand side, then the background, and it looks pretty solid. It's pretty much the same process for bringing in the props. Brush them in and retouch some of the dust and smudges on the bottle, and I'd have to say some pretty nice images. And hey, I think we rocked this one light photo challenge, and I'd like to thank Four Roses for supplying the beautiful bottle of bourbon. I'll enjoy it a little later. And hey, if you make a photo like this, please tag me in it. I'd love to check out your work. And if you like this video, give it a subscribe, a thumbs up, drop a comment down below, and I'll see you in the next one.