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My housemate has some pretty interesting glass ornaments and a glass chess set laying around and I would love to photograph them as I reckon they would make quite interesting images. I wondered what sort of camera settings / physical setup (background, lighting etc) would be best for the job?

Please remember I'm a complete newbie (and simpleton) so I will probably need every detail explained in really painfully blatant terms...

Big thanks

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My Flickr (mostly from my compact cameras but now includes the first attempt at using my DSLR )

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I will try and help out a bit but don't have time to do a full run down so will cover the basics and show you in a very quickly thrown together setup.

The example I have shown is of a white background and base and black outer reflectors to give a dark edge to the glass, but this can be reversed and you can use a dark background and base and light reflectors to give a light edge to the glass. There's a flash at the back of the table on 1/16 power pointing up at the white background, there's a studio head with softbox about 2 feet infront of the table (placed by the white arrow in the shot below) and it is metered to f8 but if you don't have a meter simply do it by trial and error until your glasses look correctly exposed.

I will say I am not overly happy about the final shot, the stem is discoloured due to my base tile being off white (almost light pink) and that is refracting up the glass, plus I oversharpened the image a bit too, but it's just a quick example which will hopefully help you a bit.

Here's a shot of the setup.



Here's the original just resized.



A little dodging of the tile edge to soften the background a bit and here's the final image.



Hope this is of some use, if you have any questions let me know and I will do my best to answer them for you.

Mark

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EOS 5D | EOS 40D | 28-80 L f2.8 - 4 (took a swim) replaced with 24-105 F4 L IS USM | 70-200 L F2.8 IS USM | 17-85 | 70-300 | 100mm USM Macro | 50mm 1.4 | 50mm 1.8 II | 2x Extender | 100mm Macro USM 2.8 | 3x 285HV Vivitar Flash | Cactus V2s Wireless Trigger system | 430EX

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Hi Mark,

Thank you ever so much for taking the time to set this up, it is a huge help. I know it looks so simple but I wouldn't have known where to begin with such a setup. Posting the finished example is very useful, too. While it may not be 'perfect', it helps me see what the outcome would be - and it is fab.

Thanks again

_________________
My Flickr (mostly from my compact cameras but now includes the first attempt at using my DSLR )

You're more than welcome

Look forward to seeing your results

Mark

_________________
EOS 5D | EOS 40D | 28-80 L f2.8 - 4 (took a swim) replaced with 24-105 F4 L IS USM | 70-200 L F2.8 IS USM | 17-85 | 70-300 | 100mm USM Macro | 50mm 1.4 | 50mm 1.8 II | 2x Extender | 100mm Macro USM 2.8 | 3x 285HV Vivitar Flash | Cactus V2s Wireless Trigger system | 430EX

My DPC Profile | My Website

Maybe you wan't to look at this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQBVSGBBiNk&feature=channel_page

I take a lot of product shots for glassware for business. Until reading Light: Science & Magic by Fil Hunter, I was at best OK at it. Now I can hardly let a "good enough" shot see the light of day. (yeah, I pun...sorry... )

There is also a nice flickr group dedicated to the book:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/84897717@N00/pool/

I am working this weekend on trying to incorporate either a bright field or dark field variant into a macro for fun competition with Glass as a theme...it's not easy as I had hoped!!

But really the book I mentioned really helped me learn so much about not just glassware (a whole chapter dedicated to it), but also opened my eyes to the whole idea of controlling light is truly a core concept in photography.