My first serious attempt at lighting glass. This is a dark field photograph of a glass bowl on a glass table, with a black board as background and two softboxes on either side.
Please comment on anything I could've improved - I'm here to learn!
bsluijk I probably can't help you in the technicals, but will try to assess your results!
Your first try is delightful. you have achieved good patterns without glare. Not sure I like the 50/50 centered composition, but that's my only critique.
It really is a good start at dark field lighting. I think you have the basics of the technique. Now I think it would be time to start experimenting, with different lighting angles, and different amounts of light. To me, it looks a little dark, and the back of the bowl seems to blend into the background.
For me I think I'm wondering whether the bowl is the feature or the reflection, there is a bit of competition as to the subject, both are giving it a go. Perhaps I would see if cutting the amount of reflection down (so we dont see all of it, maybe to the curve so it is implied) and make more space above the bowl, and maybe a tad 'hair light' to accent the back edge of the rim. Minor point, it seems to tilt slightly to viewer left. You've done well.
Most dark field work with glass involves the light source behind the subject and the blackboard or most at an angle from one side. Most folks I know use a diffusion sheet instead of a soft box so the light is stretched across the glass even more than what a SB can do. Moving the angle of the light from behind to one side will produce very different results - and it may be worth exploring here. While I understand your goal to try to light this object - very cool bowl....taking a simple glass and exploring the effect on the angle of the light in reference to the camera and the object would be a highly worthwhile exercise....
Wow a hard task but a very interesting one. Why not start with simple objects and build up to more challenging ones. This picture looks like a spaceship in the milky way.
You have started with a pretty challenging case to study! Lots of different angles to try to capture and highlight. The lighting on the top center of the bowl is pretty good but as a couple others have said, the light on the flat sections on top are a bit underexposed and does not match well the center. I wonder if some small reflectors to focus the light a bit more on those sections would be useful.
Learning how to capture light is a worthwhile endeavour. I am constantly trying to figure that one out :) Anyways. I think the lighting in this picture is interesting because it lines out all the cuts in the glass bowl, which makes the bowl look rather wild. The lighting looks a bit uneven, there are two dark areas at both top-sides of the bowl, and I think the contrast between these dark areas and the areas where the cuts are brightly lit is too proounced. I think that as an exercise in lighting, this is successful. As a picture of a bowl, well, don't know, it shows the cuts in the glass without really showing the patterns clearly. Not sure overall. I have no comments on how to improve this, I am almost completely unfamiliar with softboxes and other such things.
While I use lighting, I haven't tried to shoot glass - to me this looks excellent and as others have mentioned, no blown highlights - love the colors and the detail - nicely done indeed.
Amazing how much this looks like a water splash! I'm no lighting expert, I prefer natural lighting most the time. This looks pretty good to me, not sure I can give any worthy advice.
When uploading to your portfolio you can go beyond the 800px challenge restriction :) Experiment with Save As options and Save For Web options, I prefer the former to the latter.
For me the lighting is very well done with no blown highlights that I can see. Unfortunately, I have no real experience with setup lighting and transfers from Lightroom so I cannot offer any advice. All I can offer is that it is very nice to look at and that I'm looking forward to more of your experimentation with light.
Troublesome: on my monitor this looks great in Lightroom, with the rim of the reflection at the bottom and the table clearly defined. That is lost after export to JPG and publication on the site. Any idea what I did wrong?
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