Lighting: Indirect Lighting

Before setting your light for product shots you have to look closely at the object and analyze it. What is its shape, its structure? What material is it made of? Is it highly reflective, transparent or does it absorb light?

Today we want to talk about lighting objects that need indirect lighting like glass, metals and chrome. If you have ever tried to light any of these materials directly you know they do not tolerate this effort. Glass, especially cheap glass, will always look smeary, dusty and dirty because direct light reveals all these stains. And further, glass has the tendency to break the light direction in itself which now causes horrible reflections in the picture.

So the only way to go around this is indirect lighting. That means you direct your lamps against a highly reflective, even and wide surface. The light bounces from that surface and lights up your object.

Just like in these pictures I am showing this week, I positioned wine glasses in front of a white background and carefully directed hard light on them. Always watching out that none of the light would hit the wine glass directly.

When you try out this light setting you will be amazed that you will actually get a good result very fast.

But these are just the basic settings and your wine glass will look clean but flat. It gets more interesting when you start molding the glass into a shape which you will achieve by creating black outlines around the wine glass (see pictures) or trying to achieve a gradient.

How to do this I will not reveal. Because in photography it is trial and error that makes you learn and never forget.

Na dann, gut Licht

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