Well it's a very closely cropped Mason jar of maple syrup...I hope it makes people salivate!
Lighting it was a bastard err, an exercise in patience! I setup on the kitchen table turned lengthwise, then placed lightweight foamboard to act as b/g, surface and f/g. Thanks to help from Ryan, I learned to light the bg first, then the subject. Made all the difference in the world! Thanks babe, I owe you! :-)
Though this is essentually a studio setup, I did use ambient light here, as I shot at roughly 2pm on a very murky afternoon, so no strong light was coming in to ruin the shot. The two big floods lit the bg, a loonie-store flashlight helped knock out the foreground shadow of jar, along with a handheld reflector. All told there was probably 8 ft between tripod and wall, with jar at approx the 7 ft mark (closest to camera) as could be managed.
Something else which also helped to light up the syrup: this is a canning lid, the kind that comes in two parts. There is the simple round 'lid' part, (not visible here) and a collar (the visible part). Simply remove the flat lid, which you can't see anyway from this angle, and when shooting, fire off a handheld flash right over the now-open jar of syrup. But the lid is still in place, giving it the illusion of being sealed. But shooting off the flash certainly helped give the syrup a nice glow.
pp: RAW-TIFF conversion, crop, rotate in teeny increments to level, use magnetic lasso to select lid and apply brightness/contrast as needed. Used magnetic lasso to select and apply brightness/contrast saturation to syrup. Cloned out shadow at bottom of jar. Resize, usm, sharpen, save for web.
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As a few people noted, there is indeed an orangey cast to the syrup...*sigh* should have run a warming filter over it to give it more of the expected amber glow. Ah well.
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Ah, Snaffles, you learned a lot about lighting but missed the Product message. (I've been in the same boat so many times!)
This very fine, well presented image just confused the heck out of our viewer/voters because they could not guess what it was. Yes, I know the title was there, but that turned out to be not enough.
Second guessing like mad here, if it had a home-made label stuck on it crooked, saying something like "Aunt Jane's Original Maple Syrup" your score might well have been different.
Meanwhile, you learned how to light a glass jar with dense, translucent material in it and that's a big plus.
If it weren't for the title, I wouldn't know this was maple syrup. I was thinking, jam, some sort of orange drink - wasn't sure. The coloring is beautiful, and the shape of the bottle is interesting.
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