Some old-fashioned perfume bottles. I've never attempted to do anything with solid white backgrounds before, so I tried using sheets of white paper. For my light source, I had my desk lamp illuminating from overhead, and to soften it, I wrapped a white undershirt around it (I was quite surprised with how much softening that did - I've never used a soft box or anything like that before, so I was surprised my cheap version softened the light as much as it did.)
Photoshop work:
-Rotated 1 degree CCW
-Cropped
-Cloned out tape marks and overlap from my low-tech background (sheets of legal-sized white paper taped together)
-Cloned out folded up paper stuck under purple bottle to keep it straight
-minor Levels adjustment
-minor Color Balance adjustment
Statistics
Place: 120 out of 155 Avg (all users): 4.9610 Avg (commenters): 5.2222 Avg (participants): 4.6667 Avg (non-participants): 5.1532 Views since voting: 904 Views during voting: 285 Votes: 205 Comments: 13 Favorites: 1 (view)
I wouldn't consider this photo to be a failure. After reading your comments on it, I believe you learned a good bit about improvised lighting. Whether the image is 'dull' or not is somewhat subjective. The image is the beginning of a good product style shot. It's very difficult to achieve white backgrounds without strobes, but it can be done. Custom white balance settings help, and in the case of this photo, overexposing the photo by about one stop would help also.
I really like this picture, it really isn't dull at all. The lighting suits the mood of the picture. Sometimes, really good pictures don't do well just because they don't appeal to the masses - I gave your picture a 7 in the challenge - I like it a lot. The compostition is very good and I like the delicate quality of the shot, it goes well with the bottles.
I really like what you were trying to achieve here. Beautiful, soft, delicate, and pretty. From your comments, sounds like you learned a lot already - great! For whatever it's worth, I scored this a 5, for basically the same reasons. Technically it's pretty good, it just didn't quite do what I think it could have. :-)
Thanks for all the helpful comments, everyone. When I looked at the other entries in this challenge, I immediately thought to myself, oh, no - mine's so dull! And that's pretty much the response I got from all of you: technically sound, for the most part, but uninspired.
Considering that this was the first time I tried using a white background and really focused on lighting, though, I'm happy with the results. Now that I have a better idea of lighting for white-background subjects, I can try to be more creative when I decide to shoot them.
Great lighting and background, although I'd like to see perhaps a little more DOF, as the bottle at the front is going a little out of focus at the base.
with the focus on the front vial and its detail, i view this picture more as a collection of objects than transparancies...
i like the softness of this photo, and the pastel tones spilling onto the white background.
I like your idea. The composition is pretty good too. I wonder how this would have looked if you added an old-fashioned pair of gloves or pearls or some other "old fashioned" type object? Just a bit of something to give it a little more interest overall.
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