photo: Bjørn Christiansen, Pepsi Raw - Advertisement - Kristine Hove Røsok
Ideas is what I usually write about when explaining photo. You need to have an idea to make your shots more interesting. When I photographed this shot of Kristine Hove Røsok didn’t really have an idea. At school, Norsk Fotofagskole, we had this assignment where we were to shoot an advertisement with a bottle and a person in it. We could do whatever we liked, but one of the main goals was to shoot a nice looking bottle, I thought the assignment was a bit boring and didn’t really want to do it. At that time, I believe it to be late winter, early spring of 2011, the Pepsi Raw was released and I found this bottle to have a nice design to it. Along with quite a few other soft drink bottles, 20 in total, I worked in the studio shooting all these bottles before I had an impulsive photo shoot with Kristine. She had brought some clothes that she liked and we really just photographed for fun. Since I had this bottles in the studio from the earlier work I asked Kristine to do her fashion jumps with the bottles in her hand. Some cutting and pasting in post production I got this “advertisement”.
When photographing glass, that is, bottles, vine glass or other similar objects made of glass, there is some precautions you should keep in mind. First of all, clean the objects of any dust and pick the objects with the less scratches on them. This saves you a lot of time in post production. The other thing is to never light the objects directly, but have the light bounce off reflectors and black cards to make out the details of the glass. High lights such as the one in the middle of this bottle is made by a big Styrofoam board right behind me. Might be you can make out my reflection? The surface of the table you put your object might in some cases be reflected inside the bottle so be sure to have a nice, seamless surface to put your object. The cheap surface is a large piece of paper, the more expensive might be cabinet doors or table tops you can find at IKEA. Easiest way to shoot this kind of shots is to have your camera on a tripod and have only the modeling lamps on, this way you can make out any reflection and almost do a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get).
