# Photographing Still Products



## amicophotos (May 20, 2014)

I am photographing some energy drinks for my friend's new company but I am getting a bad glare on the products.  What should I do to reduce the glare and get a clearer picture?


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## Scatterbrained (May 20, 2014)

Are you using strobes?


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## JoeW (May 20, 2014)

amicophotos said:


> I am photographing some energy drinks for my friend's new company but I am getting a bad glare on the products.  What should I do to reduce the glare and get a clearer picture?
> 
> View attachment 74440



1.  Read "Light Science and Magic".  It will teach you about the "family of angles" which gets into why you get glare from one spot but not another.
2.  Shoot in a light tent.  Or use soft boxes.
3.  Shoot on a tripod (so you can shoot at a slow exposure and still keep it sharp).
4.  Don't use a popup flash or an on-camera flash.


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## Scatterbrained (May 20, 2014)

From the reflection it looks like you're shooting this in a light tent; you're learning why product photographers don't use light tents.      What equipment do you have at hand?  How many of these do you need to do?


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## Scatterbrained (May 20, 2014)

JoeW said:


> amicophotos said:
> 
> 
> > I am photographing some energy drinks for my friend's new company but I am getting a bad glare on the products.  What should I do to reduce the glare and get a clearer picture?
> ...



The glare he's getting is because of the light tent.


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## Scatterbrained (May 20, 2014)

Quick thoughts:  
1) Use a white sweep (can be paper or what have you) 
2) Use white diffusers on each side of the product (can be paper or fabric) 
3) Light the sweep behind the product
4) Light each diffusion panel (one on each side) 
5) Make sure the set is at least 4 1/2 stops brighter than the ambient to prevent ambient light from polluting the shot.  Make sure there are no lights on anywhere that will reflect into the product. 
6) Use a lower camera angle to give the product more presence.  
7) Use a longer focal length to both prevent perspective distortion and to minimize the family of angles that will be reflected in the surface.


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## table1349 (May 20, 2014)

Plus Crank the ISO down.  800 is way to high.  It's not like the bottle is moving around on you.  Slow shutter speeds with the camera on a tripod will work fine.


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## IzzieK (May 20, 2014)

Great advices here...


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## minicoop1985 (May 21, 2014)

As an inexpensive alternative, you can use poster board as a background. I do something a little different than Scatterbrained (his advice is spot on here), but it works. Sorta.



Bottle lighting study by longm1985, on Flickr

Ignore the little reflections-they're a couple lenses I used to hold the background up. Anyway, I put a continuous softbox on either side, then used another chunk of poster board over the camera with a hole for the lens to even out the reflections. Also used a circular polarizing filter. Hope this helps.


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## Big Mike (May 21, 2014)

> Read "Light Science and Magic". It will teach you about the "family of angles" which gets into why you get glare from one spot but not another.


This is the most important advice.  To work on this problem, you need to understand it, and this book is one of the best resource for that.

Essentially, because the bottle is 'shiny' (properties of direct reflection), it will show 'glare' from any light source that is in front of it (inside it's family of angles).  And because it's a round bottle, the family of angle is everywhere except behind it (and you obviously can't put lights behind it).  So in other words, you can't get rid of the direct reflections....however, you can light it in such a way that the glare is not a distraction. 
One way would be to make your lights very close/large so that the glare spreads out.  Another would be to move the light very far away, so that the glare spot is very small (maybe even small enough to be easy to be removed in post).  

Another way to deal with this problem, is to use a light source that will give you a nice looking reflection (since you can't really shoot without a reflection).  The common approach is that if the reflection matches the shape of the object, it will look better.  For a bottle that is taller than it is wide, a tall skinny light will usually give you a nice looking (tall, skinny) reflection.  As an example, I did an image search for wine bottles.....see how in almost all of them, the reflection (glare) is a tall skinny line (or two).  That looks much better than round or square blobs of light.  
https://www.google.ca/search?q=Wine...jgsASC44GoCw&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1442&bih=726


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