What's behind a Wine Shot

As promised here is the lighting scheme that I used on the set for the wine photo that I posted a couple of days ago. 

As you can see at first glance there are some differences  respect to the set used for other shots of mine, such as the tagliatelle one for example.

The most obvious is the camera. In this case I used a view camera to which I applied the Hasselblad digital back.

I bet many of you will ask "What the hell is a view camera?" The answer may be very technical and boring (you can read it here on Wikipedia) or a easy one: the simplest is that view cameras are those cameras with bellows used by photographers that you can see in old movies of many years ago. Well, they are still used after more than a hundred years, even if they are a little different now, because, in practice, they allow to bend the laws of optics and solve many problems.

In this situation I had the problem to keep in focus both the edge of the glass and the level of the wine, in addition to not blur too much the label of the bottle. If I used a "normal" camera I would never have succeeded unless to put the camera at the same level of the glass so to have the focus plane parallel to the sensor.

Try with your camera and you will see that all points in focus in the scene are at the same distance from the lens, if this one is tilted downward these points are also tilted and not perpendicular.

With the view camera I managed to keep the focus perpendicular to the sensor with the lens pointing downward to the subject. Maybe I have explained too technically anyway but it's really hard not to, thank me to not have put into also the Scheimpflug principle.

Regarding the light scheme instead, it is extremely simple. As I explained commenting other shots of mine I prefer a type of light that is natural and as close as possible to real situations. In this case I wanted to give the impression of a window behind the subject, a little to the right and far away, that light up a room with dark walls, which is why I did not use reflectors. A natural , "autumnal" and "Country" scene that, in my opinion, goes well with the subject, a good French cabernet (hic!).

(Alessandro Guerani is a professional photographer specialized in food shooting. He lives in Bologna, Italy, and is available for assignments to create the images you always craved. Read the "About me" or contact him using the "Mail me" in the blog menu above.)

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