A Clever Way to Photograph Glass

Last week I shared an article about putting a granite tile to good use, there was one technique in that post that I wanted to expand and make a dedicated tutorial for because it’s one of the simplest yet a classy way to light glass.

What You Need:

Background (White Background – normally I use my white seamless paper)
A Granite Tile
Speedlight with Stofen Omnibounce or a gridspot

How to:

I place an SB-600 with a Stofen Omnibounce below the granite tile and pointed it at the Background. The purpose of the Omnibounce is to create a gradient effect on the background. The farther your speedlight is from the background, the bigger the gradient is.

Here, the granite tile is really close to the background (about 1-2 feet away). The light that will be coming from the background is the one that will light my glass.

Normally I shoot at 1/160 f8, ISO 200. And my speedlight is at ¼ power.

Pretty simple huh?

Here are some shots using this technique:

Playing Around With Food Coloring

Playing with shapes

Using Gels on the background

Put CTO gel and CTB gel on my speedlight to get colors in the background.

Flame shot

For this shot I needed to shoot at a slower shutter speed to expose for the flame. I placed my camera on a tripod and instead of shooting at 1/160 (which will only show the light of my flash), I shot this at 1/10’s to expose for the flame (considered as ambient light). I used 70% solution alchohol for the flame. BE CAREFULL when doing this, the martini glass broke after doing this shot.