Photographing a bottle can be very tough to do and usually requires a fairly complicated light setup. Photographer Ian M Butterfield presented a YouTube Tutorial on how to do this two different ways: one with light reflections and one without. Of course, getting light reflections is easy while eliminating them is tough.
For starters, if you don’t want reflections. you usually need a pure white background and three lights: one on each side and another illuminating the background and outputting one extra stop of power above the side lights. But if you like the reflections, then you can just use a two light setup.
Alternatively, you could also use a light tent–which is one of the setups that Ian offers. This is one of the simplest ways to avoid any sort of reflections. The reason for this is because his softboxes are giving diffusion and the light tent is providing even more diffusion.
The really cool thing that he does though involves giving the bottle extra specular highlights. Check it out the video on how to photograph a bottle after the jump.
