Photographing Glass!

Similarly to flowers, glass has its own photography style. I found photographing glass almost as challenging as photographing jewellery. Again its all about making it look crisp and aesthetically pleasing. With jewellery you were trying to persuade the viewer to buy this product whereas with glass the aim is just to make it look as beautiful as possible. I found that the key is the reflectors.

Above are some photographs taken by one Simon Bruntnell, a  British photographer who photographs glass amound other things. He is just one of many photographers I looked at on the internet. I found that there weren't many photographers specialising in glass photography like Mr Bruntell here which might be attributed to the fact that it is a very difficult subject to photograph and isn't used very often...or at least not as much as some other specialties (e.g. commercial). What I really love about his work is the fact that most of it has a sinister feel to it. The background is often dark and he adds a lot of detail using reflectors which really makes the glass 'POP'. He also uses mirrors and reflections in a lot of his work which gives it a bit of an abstract edge.

After my research we set out to photograph glass which was at that point the hardest thing I had attempted at that point. We used wine glasses and beer bottles...they were of course already empty when we began :) However disaster struck a few weeks later where my memory card decided that it no longer like any of my photographs and destroyed them all! So I won't be able to show you the images however I do have the ones I did when I went back and did a few more on my own in the studio...here is the lighting plan I used...

After I had set up the lighting and adjusted the aperture for a correct exposure I had to choose a compostion for the subject I had chosen. At first I decided to work with this composition ...

 ...however I decided that it wasn't working because the shape of the glasses was too difficult to make out (due to the overlap).So then I went with this set up...

  

Once I had selected my compostion, I started to play around with reflectors to add detail. In the image above there is not much detail compared to the one directly below. However in this particular image I felt that there was too much detail (which is why I'm posting it!). In this particular instance less is more.

I continued to play with reflectors until I was satisfied with the level of detail. And here is the final piece....drum roll please...

I do quite like it however I was slightly limited for time when I took these so if I had more time I would have liked to experiment with some more compositions. I also would have liked a different background chair-looking thing (apparently it's called a 'small product table') because the one I used as a little scratched and I tried using my (very limited) photoshop skills to edit it however I wasn't really able to do much (again I refer you to my limited PS skills!).