Marina Danieli Estate exports excellent Italian wines all over the world and they needed new pictures for their online catalog. I was visiting their offices today and just pulling together a few things I was able to produce quite good images.
For the set I used two white table clothes, an old wall calendar, a cardboard box.
I pointed my SB900 towards the wall to have a nice soft key light and the sb80 towards the white background.
I set my X-T1 in manual mode, disabling the exposure preview in the viewfinder. I selected ISO200 for the lowest possible noise, I stopped the lens at f8 to have a nice depth of field on the labels but with just enough blur on the backdrop, shutter speed 1/180s to make sure it was able to sync with my speedlights. I used the camera flash to remotely fire the two Nikon flashes set up in slave SU-4 mode.
Once I was set with the camera, I started working my strobes. For this kind of lighting I always start adjusting the background light first. I wanted a nice white saturated rim around the bottle without a milky effect on the labels. This will make post production super easy.
When the background light was done, I added the foreground light, flashing the wall to have a soft evenly distributed light on the labels and nice catchlights on the glass.
As soon as the first bottle was done, I simply kept all the settings in place for every bottle I had to take pictures of. In 10 minutes the entire shooting was done. 15 more minutes on Lightroom and photoshop and this is the final result. Pretty cool for a 30 minutes shooting on the budget!
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