Lighting a glass bottle

[Artyom Zakharenko]

Hello hello my fellow filmmakers... A few days ago i was dealing with the following 'problem'

 

Lighting a packshot of a glass perfume bottle.. the perfume and glass are so transparant that its almost impossible to make it visible, it absorbs any background color, ive tried different things like making a hole in the table to throw some light under the bottle but no effect... i guess it's just the way it is? See the shot below

 

[dan kessler]

You don't say what kind of lights you're using.

 

Basically, with reflective or transparent subjects like glass, water, etc.,

you want to rely more on soft lighting. Brilliantly lit areas are really

just reflections or refractions of the large, soft sources.

 

Opaque subjects with surface texture and color respond better to hard,

directional lighting, like fresnels.

[Eric Geiger]

Lighting glass is like lighting a car or a mirror: you light what the object "sees", not the object itself. Put large soft source like a flat or chimera in such a way that, from the cameras position, you see it reflected in edges of the object. Use a hard light from top or side to add the sparkle.

 

Eric

[Chris Keth]

There's a pretty solid chance in that photo on the right that the left bottle has a piece of white card or diffusion material hidden behind it.

[Mark Dunn]

Light the background, not the object.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=&q=perfume+bottle&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGLL_en-GBGB367GB367&ie=UTF-8&biw=1045&bih=662&sei=d9zFT5eVOMj08QOegr2HBg&tbm=isch

[Mei Lewis]

This book will tell you exactly how to do it:

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Light-Science-Magic-Introduction-Photographic/dp/0240812255/ref=dp_ob_image_bk

[Artyom Zakharenko]

There's a pretty solid chance in that photo on the right that the left bottle has a piece of white card or diffusion material hidden behind it.

 

that is actually a plastic bottle with yellow gel in it :)