Champagne Shoot!

I just finished a shoot for Louisiana Cookin Magazine that included photographing individual bottles of champagne.  I figured this may be interesting for someone to see.

One of the first things I did was peel off the back labels so they were not seen and to allow light through. Glass can be tricky.  It reflects everything and I was fighting with the reflections of white on the base of the bottles.  I was shooting them on white to show the color of the glass and to make it easy to cut them out in post.  I gave a call to fellow food photographers Chris Vaccaro and Mark Boughton to see what idea's they had.  It pays to have talented food photographers as friends.

To solve my reflection problems I started by placing black paper down where the bottle would eventually sit.  I then used an upside down glass to elevate the champagne bottle.  That controlled the reflections on the bottom of the bottle.  Next I set two black cards, one on each side, to create a defined edge of the bottle.  Voila! It worked great.

Below is my studio setup. The lighting setup was main soft box to the left, fill soft box to right, and background light behind / overhead.  My camera was tethered to the computer in the back right of the photo.  All the photos were captured using Lightroom 3.

After all the images were captured I did further editing in Photoshop if needed.  Below is a before and after example of label reconstruction.  Look closely at the tears on the labels.

Below is the one of the final products before getting cut out.

Comments

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