Photo Active

10 things you can shoot this month, from guitars and wild heather to kestrels and harbours… and yourself

Wendy Evans

1/13 sec f/3.3 ISO 200

1 | CREATIVE

Assemble and light product shots

Wendy Evans gets all fragrant with this guide to shooting old perfume and cologne bottles

This month’s creative project can be tackled with perfume, cologne, aftershave, eau de toilette, fragrance or whatever name you might care to apply to the stuff that makes everyone smell better in crowded spaces. The idea is to save your empty bottles – this might work better with women’s fragrances because, besides having a better aroma, the designs tend to be more interesting.

How you approach this project depends on the kind of lighting equipment you happen to have. For example, one option is to put coloured card behind the bottle and fire a light at it using a modifier, such as a snoot (a cone that produces a spot of light), then light the foreground with another light. You could create a pleasing halo effect behind the bottle, but you need to watch out for shadows. The other option is to use reflective card and just one light, which is what I’m doing here.

1 Make your own

One way to focus your light, whether it’s an LED unit or a flashgun, is to use a homemade snoot. For this, I took some of the silver card, rolled it up until it tapered to a point, then stuck it down with tape. I added another sheet to cover the gap at the bottom, cutting out a slot for it to fit over the bracket on the stand.

2 Setting it up

For this shot, I placed gold reflective card as the base and a pink-gold card as the background. The bottles were arranged with the key one at the front and I focused on that. With a relatively flat plane, it enabled a wide aperture of f/3.3 to throw the rest out of focus, making the background a swathe of colour.

3 Position the light

The problem with a front light was the shadow caused by the main bottle. Alternatively, shining the spotlight on the reflective background produced hot spots, so the best location for it was overhead. As the bottles were transparent, the light added some sparkle to the glass. A 105mm macro lens was used for the shot.

Snoot

Options for lighting the background

I also had an attempt at creating a more stark result using the snoot fitting for my light. Here, I placed a black perfume bottle on the reflective silver card, with a plain white card as the background. Next, I moved the snoot and aimed the light at the background to create the pattern, making a vignette effect that highlights the perfume bottle in the centre.

When shooting, I made sure that the focus was on the letters on the middle part of the bottle. I shot a few alternatives in portrait orientation, using the reflective card and different bottles.

And how not to do it...

Pictured above is another experimental version that used front lighting and had the bottles placed on a silver card with a white background. It was shot at f/8, which created more depth of field. The shadows are a slight issue but the background is messy. Neither of these approaches gave as good a result as the main image on the previous spread.

Getty

TIP CARDS

This project features in this month’s photo tips cards. For a handy guide to capturing photos like this, take your tips cards out with you.

2 | ACTION

Bowling for soup

Wendy Evans explains what to look for in the world of jacks, draws and drives

Lawn bowls, or crown green bowling, is a two-player or team game where the closest balls to the jack in each end win the points – basically, marbles for grown-ups. Lawn bowls has the reputation of being a retirement sport, mainly because all ages can play and it’s not a fast-moving or impact-driven pursuit. That doesn’t mean to say you can’t get some great photos from it, if the composition works and you’ve packed the right lens.