How to Photograph Beverages

Jim Divitale shows how to take a picture of a beverage, including the use of light and the retouching process.

Leverages have a lighting formula all to themselves. Today, we’re going to work with how to sweat the bottle, how to make light come through it, how to work with liquids to make a look as real as it was possible and have the clinked go home happy and coming back for more every time. One of the things that we have to do in this video a lot is food and beverage. I like to take a look today at how we do a basic beverage shot from preparing the glass be shot to looking at how we do the Digital exposures and put all the pieces together. I've decided to do a simple coca cola glass shot. We’ve taken a coke glass, and to get this ready, we’ve taken it outside so we don’t have the fumes in here then we spray the glass with the combination of two sprays. I've given a clean coat of crystal clear by quite a long which gives the glass a very, very nice clean coat of a sort of a frosted look and look at it dry. Once that’s dry, I’ll take a sprain out and very lightly spray just little dots of glue across the glass itself. this is going to help the glues sewn in water adhere and sort of stop, and sort of bit up and sip right on top of the glass. So once we’ve got that set, I’ll go into the kitchen, I'm going to put in my ice cubes. We use different type of glass, sculptured ice cubes of different sizes. And of course, whenever you’re shooting product, you must use the real product, so never try to fake a product if it’s for a client. In this case, we’re going to use a coca cola. Now, in wonderful of my lidding ratio to look good, I'm turning up the color and change the color, but I need to thin it down a little bit because of the light I want to pass through the glass. I'm just going to put a little bit of water and then adjust the light in this consistency for the specific power that I have coming through so I don’t want to wrap the light so bright that it’s going to wrap around the edges of the glass and cause it to be diffused so that’s a sort of a mixture of how you want the consistency to look to match to the lidding. We’re going to use the 1DS mark two and the 90mm tilt shift lens on this. We’re going to want a very sharp image so I'm going to go ahead and use about an F stop of F20. We’ve done a custom white balance for the stroke so that’s already set in the camera. So we are already all set. We’ve already test what I’ve taken a look at the color and make sure that that looks good. So now, we are about ready to shoot. When I brought the glass over to the set, the last thing I want to do is use a little bit of glistering water and I'm going to sprits it with the different distances so I can try to get large and small droplets of water to beat up as if we just pooled a lot of ic chest and it’s bidding for a water. We’re letting the light come through, to look at the lining right now. We have a light behind the selective, which is on the acrylic light table with the piece of white frosted flax of glass on it, and the lights coming through. I have the ratio of the lied in the back about two or three times brighter than the side like here. I've got one string hand and a very small box and in order to change the specular highlight size, I have a blue more with the flag and I can move this blue more in and out to a sort of change how big or how wide we want at the specular highlight on this glass to be. We’re dealing with liquids and glass where in a sort of like that a specular highlight the light made by the source of self is very critical and we want it to sculp the glass. Now, because I can, because it’s digital, I can shoot this in a couple of photographs. I can change the size of the specular light on the glass and then if I want t. I can move the light to another position to light the letters better and even though it’s soaring the reflection in place as I don’t want. I could just use the area that I’d o want to paint in a couple of reflection so I probably do one or two exposure to the end. And because I have a live view, I can just glance over to the manager and see exactly what I'm getting as I move the lights around then see the bedding over here and pick into the camera constantly, or constantly reshooting the see in the new image. I want to be able to see just make it the decision and pop the shot. Move the light again and pop the shot. So again we’re going to always be taking pictures in sequence in perfect registration without moving the subject with the camera. In that way, they’re all perfectly registered and we’ll bring them in the Photoshop. So let’s take a look first by taking just the general photograph onset. We’ll get it to shot it on the screen which whether we’re happy with the general look in the size of the specular highlight and I'm likening what I see so far. So what I need to do now is the last step. I want it to be a little bit freshly posts of taking some coca cola and I’ll put just a drop of soap and I’ll just make it a little sudsier and I'm going to stir it up into a fray. And once I get this fray for really nice and some bubbles in it, I'm going to take the spoon and I'm just going to drop a few around the edges of the glass just to make it look like it’s sort of freshly pour right out of the can. We don’t want too much and then you have to kind a sort to break it up a little bit goes along way. So again, we’ll get another shot now and it looks like any just a little more sprits as I set that out there. It looks like it dried up a little bit. Come on go ahead and get my sprits can just here and come in and give it a little shot, and I'm going to protect it. As you can see here, I want to make sure I got nice sprits all over the glass and I like that very good. I'm going to tell and wipe up a little excess. You can see I’ll retouch it later but that would be much more work than just taking a talent here and wiping it up. So if it’s possible, always work clean on the set. And I’ll look again through the camera. I can see in the light focus over here and I'm good with that, and one more little square right here. You can see it right there. And we’ll take our finals shot and I like the little fist on the top. It’s just giving that extra look.