Hi gang , welcome to our new home ! Food Pixels blog has been moved to our website and has a new, more interactive interface; please continue giving us all the support you can so we can keep growing and improving.

The pic above is my toast to the new beginning and it gives me the chance to tell you about bright-field lighting, which is a lighting technique proving very useful to photograph glass objects: light is kept mostly off the subject, thus making it visible against a light background.

The following diagram illustrates the set up I used for all of the shots featured in this post; the only thing that changes is that in the first picture I had a second flash, camera left at 9 o'clock,  pointing at the hand holding the bottle, which otherwise would be in shade. The flash is gridded so that the light doesn't spill all around the place. I added a warm filter in Photoshop using adjustment layers and that's about it.

The concept is pretty simple: glass against a bright background must be kept dark to be visible; this can be seen better in this pic I took before pouring wine into the decanter

Bright-field lighting is a great technique to reveal and showcase shape in glassy object; besides this, having the light coming at the subject from behind, makes for a great opportunity to experiment and play with all sorts of fluids and other translucent or semi-translucent foods, i.e. oil, ice cubes, jelliesâ?¦.. etc.

This is just some food colorant being dropped into a glass ( semi ) full of water;  In some situations you might have to dial in a bit of frontal fill, if your subject appears to be too dark; if that's the case remember to watch out for specular reflections on the glass.

And, finally, this is a shot of 3 Riedel glasses on their own, where the focus is all on composition and shape

If you want the background to be white instead of grey-ish remember to overexpose by at least 2 stops.

I hope you enjoyed this post; I certainly did enjoy taking these pics and would like to see your shots, if you decide to give it a go.

Dario Milano, Food Pixels Sydney, Food Photography and Food Styling Blog

Posted in Food, Photography, techniques

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