Going Up – Behind the scenes

[yelvertoft]

I had seen a picture in a magazine a few months ago, showing some water being poured from a bottle, with a wine glass below the opening of the bottle. However, the water was pouring upwards, away from the glass. I was very impressed by this idea and wanted to have a go at recreating the scene.

Firstly, the scene had to be reverse engineered – how had this been done? The obvious way was that the bottle was pouring the correct way, and it was the glass, and the base it was “standing” on that was upside down; the whole scene being rotated for viewing. So, all I had to do was figure out how to mount a wine glass onto a smooth, shiny base (such as a sheet of Rudra Glass) and turn this assembly upside down, mounted in a way that would allow me to get in with a bottle to pour water. All this, ideally, without spending any cash.

I decided I could use a clothes drying rack I had, the kind of thing you get to put washing over the bath to drip dry. This had an “A” shape with rungs at regular intervals. The wine glass was stuck to a small sheet of Rudra Glass (search WPF if you don’t know what I’m talking about here) with two blobs of blu-tak, and the assembly positioned upside down on one of the upper rungs of the rack. The rack was resting on my dining room floor.

Anyone who’s ever tried shooting glassware will know that the trick is in controlling reflections. Flash from the front of the scene is pretty much a no-no as this will produce horrendous hot-spots and ugly reflections, the scene pretty much has to be back lit to give both bits of glassware the transparency they need. So, a plain white paper backdrop was setup behind the “A” frame rack and a flash put on the floor pointing upwards and backwards towards the white paper; the flash was set behind the main subject. The idea was that the flash would bounce off the paper, backlighting through the glassware.

The camera was setup on the other side of the “A” frame to the backdrop, and mounted on a tripod. This requires a tripod that can go very low as the camera has to be below the plane of the Rudra Glass. A quick bit of framing up through the viewfinder showed that in the room space I had available, I was going to need something in the 40-50mm lens range, which in turn meant the perspective was wider angle than I’d hoped and controlling bits of stray clutter was a challenge. Once I’d got the framing roughly ok, I connected the flash remotely by a single contact PC cable, set everything to manual, set the shutter to 1/125, aperture to f/8 to get the DoF I needed, fired off a couple of test shots and adjusted the flash power manually to get the exposure I wanted.

It was at this point I realised the backdrop was terribly creased, the angle of the flash lighting was throwing every little crinkle into relief. I needed to get the lighting to be less acute an angle to the paper, so the backdrop was moved back and the flash raised and pointed more square on to the backing. Having a 45mm lens at this point meant it was difficult to keep the flash unit out of the frame but in the space I had available there was little option. If you have a big space to do this kind of thing, I recommend you use a focal length of about 100mm, it reduces the clutter. With pushing the backdrop away from the subject, I’m really getting quite pushed for space now. By putting the white backdrop further away, I have to adjust the flash output to correct the exposure as the distance travelled by the light is further and flash follows an inverse square law – for a given power output, if you double the distance, only ¼ of the light gets to the subject. Fortunately, the backdrop was still showing as the reflected surface in the upside down glass sheet. I’d have had trouble if the floor was now on show in the reflection. By putting the background further away, I could also use this to throw the paper out of focus and consequently reduce the visible texture of the paper this way.

If I’d been able to use a longer focal length and shoot from further away, less area of the backdrop would have in view. This would have helped to reduce the effect of the “hot spot” patch from the flash on the backdrop. As it was, the flash was still a relatively close distance to the backdrop and the resulting light distribution was far from even, regardless of zoom setting on the flashgun. With this limitation in mind, I chose to angle the flash to put the hot spot in the centre, behind the top of the glass.

Knowing how flash can blast through glass, removing any edge definition and contrast, I knew I had to hang black flags either side of the subject. Two pieces of black card were taped to the glass sheet to hang either side of the wine glass. This would give black edges to the glass, bottle and provide definition for the shape made by the water as it poured. Framing was once again adjusted to get the tips of the card out of the scene.

So, if you can’t figure out what’s going on…….
Look at a capital A. Imagine the crossbar of the A is a sheet of glass painted matt black on its upper face. There is a wine glass stuck, upside down on the underside of the sheet of glass. Two sheets of black card are taped on the underside of the sheet of glass, one hangs down on each side where the crossbar of the A meets the sloping sides. A large sheet of white paper hangs behind the A frame, a flashgun sits on the floor between the A frame and the paper. The camera sits in front of the A frame.

Once this was all setup, a large bowl was placed on the floor, immediately below the upside down glass. The wine bottle was filled with water and poked through the side of the “A” frame. Water was poured from the bottle into the bowl below as the shutter was operated via a cable release.

The resulting image can be seen here:
http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...hp?photo=41893

Once I’ve got some further advice from Rudra on smoothing out the lighting, I’ll repost an edited version.

[andy153]

Thanks Duncan, very well done and very well explained.

[Tugboat]

wow..sounds like a challenge....thanks for the explanation,very interesting,
I might have to have a go at it !!!

[Don Hoey]

Duncan,
I will be back to properly re-read this when I have a bit more time from my latest workshop photo oriented project. For now I will say that is a superb piece of reverse engineering an image. Really interesting to read how you managed this without all the kit available for the original studio shot.

Needless to say, I am seriously, seriously, impressed.

Don

[yelvertoft]

This is what it looks like after Rudra has worked his magic on it. All I have to do now is figure out how he's done it. I have the .psd file with all Rudra's layers in it, so I can see what he's done, just got to reverse engineer the how he's done it bit.

[Rudra Sen]

Few points I must mention here.
Image quality is exceptional. It has a smooth tonal range. Most importantly, it has no sensor dust marks. Normally a big chunk of time goes to clean those marks.
Lighting is even enough to capture all the details.

Duncan as we’ve discussed before, get a 4 X 4 white acrylic (translucent, not opaque) sheet for this kind of shoot. It has few advantages.

1. It allows light to pass and act as a large soft box.
2. There’s no problem like folds and wrinkle marks like a paper roll.
3. You shoot a direct light source and not a bounce source. So probably you can use lesser flash power. Lesser power also means shorter duration that helps capturing liquid splash.
4. It’s easy to store. Wrap it with a paper and slip it behind any bookcase or wardrobe. I’m sure Debbi won’t mind that.
5. It’s not expensive as a soft box. Roughly speaking, it shouldn’t cost more than 7–10£.

[yelvertoft]

Originally Posted by Rudra Sen

Duncan as we’ve discussed before, get a 4 X 4 white acrylic (translucent, not opaque) sheet for this kind of shoot. It has few advantages.

1. It allows light to pass and act as a large soft box.
2. There’s no problem like folds and wrinkle marks like a paper roll.
3. You shoot a direct light source and not a bounce source. So probably you can use lesser flash power. Lesser power also means shorter duration that helps capturing liquid splash.
4. It’s easy to store. Wrap it with a paper and slip it behind any bookcase or wardrobe. I’m sure Debbi won’t mind that.
5. It’s not expensive as a soft box. Roughly speaking, it shouldn’t cost more than 7–10£.

Thanks Rudra, I'll go buy a sheet. I found this article on similat lines:
http://www.benjaminkanarekblog.com/?p=535

Benjamin Kanarek is a very, very good fashion photographer, his blog is well worth a browse.