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How to Photograph a Bottle With and Without Reflections

Chris Gampat
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10/08/2014
1 Min read

Last Updated on 10/08/2014 by Chris Gampat

Bottle photography

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.

bottle How to Photograph a Bottle light tent Reflections softboxes
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.