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Lesson Info

Shoot: Beer Bottle Diffusion Trick

I've got two things that I used to make artificial ice to make it look like it's really I see. These are both from Trend Growth Studios, which is a special effects studio there out of New York. These things are absolutely amazing. First is crystal ice, which gives you pretty good size chunks of ice. I'm actually going to go with ice powder, which gives us little tiny bits of ice on. I'm going to use those to kind of paint on the surface, and it's a simple matter of porn. Some edible rob people don't have access to that. What? What's an alternative to use at home? You need to have access to this. The one thing you could do this would not be fun. This is actually the same stuff that's in a diaper. Um, so it's similar? Um, not exactly identical. If you have any diapers, you could cut them open and try to get the stuff out. I don't know if that would work, cause I've never, ever tried that. Um good question, Gary. I don't know if they could do it, though. This might be one of those things ...

where you absolutely just have to access. Have access to the real thing. Okay, so what? Cameras on you can see. I just had a little bit of water to it, and it's starting to get kind of nerd it up. I need to add more water, cause it's not quite there yet. It's going to take a few minutes, and it will. This stuff actually soaks up 500 times its own weight in water, so it gets really puffy. It's an amazing little product. And if I make it to Soupy, I just ADM or of the ice powder. What's amazing? A little goes a long way. I don't need nearly this amount, but, And another tip, Don't put this down the drain. If you're working with the stuff and you put it in your dream, you just clogged your drain and you're gonna be taken it apart. Um, it's because it sucks up water, right, and it creates a nice clock. So if you're gonna be using this stuff and you have some left over and you don't need it, go ahead and throw it in the trash can and wipe it out. I don't want it in your drink. Is this something that you learned in school or from your dad. You know, this is a skill that you've from other photographers. This is this is one of the tricks of the trade that you learn a zone apprentice when you're working in the studio. And I just gave it to you guys. You didn't even after working my studio. Yeah, sure. Happy to um Yeah, I never would have heard about this until I got into a studio. So you can see how it's starting. Teoh come together and it looks like ice. All right, it's getting there. I was gonna add a hair, more water, and we're probably gonna be good to go. Do you use that when you have paper labels? Yeah, but the clear code that we put on top of it protects the papal paper label. Very valid point the's air A P els, which are applied plastic label. So they won't degrade when you put drops of glycerine water on it. Paper would absolutely do that. The only way to protect it is to put the crystal clear on top of that label. And then it won't suck up the water. Because if you do it on paper label you. You've also crap that out completely. It shot it. Thank you. Sure. Ready for another question from the Internet. I'm absolutely cool. This one is from a Tony Rosalind and is asking if you take into account the consistent story telling in terms of the relationships to the object in the photograph. For example, one of the bottles is totally full of beer, and one is empty with a full glass next to it. Actually, it's not. It's full to its full. Yeah, there's a there's a liquid level when their, uh right here and right there we would actually never. A client would never want to show an empty bottle. That just wouldn't happen. That would completely go against the brand so intuitively you would pour beer and set it next to the glass, and the bottle would transfer from the liquid, would transfer from the bottle to the glass. That doesn't happen in photography. What happens is magically there's a very full beer right there, and there's a full glass of full bottle right next to it. So that's just the way it has to be that that gets again to a legal issue and to brandish you brands would just never allow that to happen. That's an ever flowing bottle of there ever flowing. It's never will. You wanted to have her flowing model of your It are you? You don't see the other bottle? Yeah, there's another. Thank you. That highlights kind of interesting. I like that. Like the two. Let's get it on the other bottle as well. So I added this one light in, and if you look on the bottle on the left, I'm starting to get a nice highlight that's coming down the edge. Um, see if I could move this light in a little bit without getting it in the frame right here. You want to give that pot, go back one, please. And back in, back down the other way. I lost a little bit on the base. Didn't I try that? I didn't help much. What do you think of that? I mean, I don't mind it. Just the I mean, what part concerns you? Um, The only thing in the previous one back a couple. I like the way it transferred all the way down. Now that I'm moving in, it's not doing that, You know, let me change grids. Maybe if I switch grids, I can get it to go a little bit broader. I've got a pretty tight grid in there, so I'm gonna open the grid up by swapping it with another one. And maybe I can get to the right amount of light to come through. Do you think you want to do is you're walking around and set b Be conscious of where your head is because you can. Usually going ahead of lots of stuff. I know from experience. A lot of experience. Probably too much experience. Give that a world, please Happened in a little bit. I don't know about enough, but it helped a little bit. Right. Give out. Hey, Gary killed it. Yeah, like before. We'll go without gonna make it a little hotter, You think? Is that gonna Is that gonna be too much? Let's try it. That's the answer. What's that? Four tense in and hit it again. Just a second. Okay. I'm gonna make a couple moves here. I now feel like I've really got to start thinking about how that second glass is gonna look. This is really unusual. I almost always have multiple glasses. To only have one is kind of a big No, no, don't do what we're doing. Have multiple. It just so happens that when we were talking about this shot back in ST Louis, we're going through my proper room and this is the glass that we picked out would really feel felt like it was the best glass. Of course, we only pick out the one that you have one of Yeah, and I bought it several years ago and there's no tag on it. There's no way to find out what the glass waas and get. So we have one. Uh, so thank God I made it here in one piece. And let's all keep our fingers crossed that I don't break it while we're trying to do this. Rob, how many glasses would you say are in the proper, um, for studio in our studio 300? Yeah. What do you think? Probably more. 405 100. You think we have 500 glasses. So in the prop room, there's an entire wall that's 12 feet high, just completely full of rocks classes, bourbon glasses, martini glasses. Just so someone like Pat can come by with his idea, pick out the glassware and if we don't have what he wants, then we have to go shopping for it and get it. So this is keep in mind. That's an accumulation of time. I've been in the business for a while. I'm known for doing beverage. We go out and with a lot of our jobs, we go out and buy new glassware. You don't wanna have the same glasses showing up in a lot of things, but we have to buy. These glasses are not something that we wind up returning. As you take the labels off. We do a lot of stuff. Tomb. So over the years I've been collecting them. That does bode well for my my current clients in the end, because I have a massive stock of glassware and I don't have to go out. And I don't have to spend $200 on glassware and $600 on sending a prop stylist to do that. You know, I just saved them 8 $800,000 by using what we have. Um, some clients don't want to do that. In fact, some clients want glassware that only we use. We have a few glasses that are stuck in a box and aren't allowed to be used ever again because the client wanted that on Lee for their brand. And that's the only place I use them. I don't even offer them to any other clients. And when we come back to that, if it's for that specific client, we can pick up that glass. Where again? So sometimes there are things that a proprietary like that, and we gotta have space for it. So we're gonna remember where the glasses on the right. And now we're gonna move it to the left. And I have the feeling that the bottle that's on the left I'm gonna want to take further out to the left because I'm thinking that other glass needs to be in the middle, right? So and we might get into a little Photoshopped manipulation on this as we try to do the to go ahead and pop that for me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's awful. No, I hate that. Let's see what happens if it looks what it looks like on the other side. But then it feels like it's bookended Yeah, that's what I mean. Okay, how about if we do this? Let's go. Let's bring let's switch these two, All right. Whoa! Im ki stoning like crazy. Um, why did you say Whoa? What do you thinking? Because as I look at this as I brought this this bottle over to the side, I like the way the composition is gonna feel a little bit better cause it feels like there's stuff going in the distance. But you can see how that is now rocketing into the side. It's key stoning. So, Carrie, let's first check on the color. Are the camera correction to see if we have lens correction on there? No, we don't. What's girls here in study? It's not even in the pool down yet. You go go here. Lens corrections. Yes, to hang it on. Um, what's crap? It's getting pretty close to the edge. Let's see what it looks like. Just curiosity. Let's see what it looks like without distortion. And do the chromatic didn't do much. Let's take out the ones. Hang on. There's something we're missing. So, rob by keys turning Do you mean lens distortion by key stoning? Yeah, it's a combination of a couple things. One. My camera angle is so low that as that lenses looking upwards, things are key stoning. They're going in. So you know, you know, Keystone is something like when they would build doorways of the art store where the keystone would be the top and it's the one. It would be inverted going this way, and it would It would hold that entire arch up. So we use that at, you know, as a way of saying how this is kind of going a little bit angle. It's not how I want it. I want those bottles actually to snap up HASA Blood does have a place in there where you can help to correct that, and I was hoping that we could go ahead and turn it on. It was already on, so we're We've got a lot of key stoning here, and we're probably going to do some digital manipulation to kind of help snap that up. Some of it might not be bad, right, But that amount is a little much can happen there for one second question for you. As far as like, for those of us who don't shoot warehouse. A bladder would like a tilt shift lens. Work for something like this or not. Yeah, absolutely. It can make a huge difference. In fact, HASA blood makes a tilt shift lens. That's really quite beautiful. I wish I had one here to show you guys because it's really quite amazing. Tilt shift Will will go a long way to helping to reduce that. Give me one second. I just want to concentrate on finding something to see if I've got it. Not too. It's quiet, all right, we're gonna have to correct it a little bit in post. But immediately when I said Whoa, that just I saw that I reacted toe Wow, that's Keystone ing like crazy. If you go back, go back like three images. See how the bottle when it's when it's in the middle more it's much straighter. It doesn't have a key stealing property. So now I turn into the art director. What do you think? Uh, the only thing I mean, honestly, the only thing throwing me more than that is just that I mean the angle of that. It's so close to ST. But it's not street doing me, and like I mean, that's the only thing. That's obviously what if we did this? What if we pushed both of those back back in the middle in the middle? A little bit more. So we have a little bit extra room over there. Okay, So problem solving, that's what I'm doing. Pop another, please, Gary. Hey, I just know something. We have a color correction off from a previous image. Let's pull that off just unchecked the box at the top, right? And see what it does. Oh, it makes a kind of green and crappy. Uh, let's keep it on or to tell. I think I do like it off. You like it off. So this is off. That's within our look at the town's right there when it's on. Yeah, there's a little hair green knows, actually. Let's do this. We're gonna go to default. We're gonna grab this. It's like a little green. Let's amber this out. So one of the nice things about HASA Blad is that I've got the ability to really control colors. What? What I'm doing right now is I went back to the default setting and I want to change the beer a little bit. I like the cobalt blue. It's looking pretty good, but the beer has got a little tent to green. And I'm looking on this monitor the miners that you guys we're seeing, really, The color is almost night and day. So I want to look at this one because this actually is a calibrated monitor on. I'm just gonna make a little bit of a change here. That's too much. If you look right now, um, one of things that I'm looking at is changing the tone of this a little bit without any color correction on it. That beer is looking a little bit of green, like there's just too much green coming through. So I'm taking the yellow tone, which is holding too much green. I'm grabbing it and I'm pushing it a little bit more towards the yellow red, active in a saturated a hair. More so that's what I meant. Much better. Can you guys see that difference? You can see it. The greens definitely coming out. Absolutely. All right. So I'm happy with that and we're going to take another capture because that's going to then apply it. If I don't take that that next capture is not going. Apply it on Dykan. Go back. If I don't like this, I can turn it off or I can go back to a previous capture. Hold on it, Do another one and it's gonna pick up that color correction, which is something that I have to be careful with with this particular software. If I go back and I'm making some moves and I made a color correction and done something like that, and I click on a previous image and take a new image from there, I've grabbed that information, and now I've got that color correction on there, even though I intended to go to something else. So that's something that I have to be very careful with. All right, let's see how our selections looking because I want to start to get this thing dressed. This is a question from Twitter from Garrett Boyd, who wanted to know he has, Since you don't have a single hero light set up, how do you repeat if a client requests and I'm just wondering if you ever want to do a similar shot? Or are you? Do you have any way of mapping everything that you're doing way completely measure everything that we do here. First and foremost, we take Atanas still shots. Secondly, we usually take video. Third, we will measure the height of the camera from the floor to the bottom of the ball head. We always use the same ball head. We put an incline ometer on the lens, which tells us the angle of the camera. We record all this information down, including the power pack settings, and we very often measure stuff in terms of distance because I have so much repeat business and we have to go back. And like wild turkey, is a great example. They are constantly adding to that line, and in the end of 2011 we did a complete redo of their entire library of bottles. So everything that is released in North America, Japan, Australia, Europe, all of those bottles had different labels on. We had to shoot them all. Since 2011 they've added several products and we have to have an image of that new product that matches the old. So we know exactly what that set needs to be, and we can go. We rebuild it time and time again. That comes at the very end of the shoot. Before we break it all down, we make sure that we measure absolutely everything, take detailed notes, have video and have stills. And then it goes into we create a set folder in each and every one of our job holders. So you saw Gary creating those job folders earlier? We create a set folder and the digital files for that. And the notes go in that folder and they stay with the job. And there are They also remain on the computer so that we can go back and we can look at that time and time again. Pull it up almost instantly. We also have it with us in case we need to shoot it in Chicago. It doesn't matter where we are. We can recreate that stuff. So we're kind of meticulous, very important. Another? Yeah, we're kind of meticulous about that stuff. Gary, did you cut a hole in this? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so it's I wouldn't call it a circle. Would you? Cut and there's a whole All right, I got idea. I'm think we don't have a ton of time before break, and I'm wondering if we don't want to refine the set a little bit more. Get the lighting exactly where we want it. If you wouldn't mind if you would export this guy and the one with the with the glass on the right. And quickly and Photoshopped put the glass on the right in there. I want to see what that composition is looking like. And then when we come back from break, I wanted then dress the bottles and will really start to shoot him. Because the dressing you know, it'll start to dry out. And I just want to give us a little time. I don't want to drive start to drive during the break. So that's my thought process. And that's where we're gonna go. So one let's do this guy. It's a giant clam. Smaller. You know what? There's one right there. Can I have that smaller one? So just wait too big. Thank you. Yeah. Interesting safety, Gary. Normally, I would have normally we already have this cut out. You know, Had I known, you know, I would have taken the lens off, measured it, cut a perfect circle in it, But since We didn't have it. May I do it? It's all good. Can this move a little bit? I'm that guy and I'm gonna move this guy. Okay, So now one thing I need to do is remember exactly where my polarizer is, so I think about it as an O clock. All right, so I'm gonna look at this, and it's really kind of at 11 o'clock. And the reason I'm gonna do that is I have to pull that over here. Bring this back this way. Game of inches. I need this. Oh, sorry. Over to the other side So I can bring this around all man. Gary, I ripped a perfect circle. Dude. Sorry, bro. It's cool, man. Yes, it happens. All right, So going back over here, I'm gonna find to this a little bit. All right? Does that look two similar? No, that's what I don't like. It don't like it either. We just duplicated. I thought we were going. We got a sweet shows. You we got to switch those. Did you want to do with the earlier one? Let's see it. Yeah. Way just made an ugly image without question. All right, but let's see what that looks like. This one. Yeah, weight. Which the? So this is a typical in that we only have one glass, but it's typical and that we will pull stuff out of focus, put it in photo shop, start to calm things up a little bit and check it, especially if we've got clients that are working remotely. If we don't have everybody in the studio and we have to have answers on stuff, we will go ahead and we'll start to calm these images in Photoshop, put them together and then sent him off for approval. It'll be a quick comp. It'll be a rough compound. We tell them that straight up, but at least this way we know what's going on. Bam, that's a way better. Yeah, I think we could take that bottle or that glass on the left and push it even further back. Make it smaller so there's more dimension. That's why I was just gonna just Do you think the bottle can go back to our just? Absolutely. I mean, I just absolutely Are you hating it? No, not hating it. I just mean there right now, there's looks like there's you know, half inch difference between between him. It seems like I'd like to push the one further back to make it. They don't look so similar. I don't see what we got. That might not be bad. All right? I like that better. My initial thought is that the bottles are too close. All right? No. Yeah. Better. All right, Well, you explode. That start look good. We export that. You guys go ahead and put that together. If you look at the difference in the bottles, you see how dead they were there? Um, just putting this diffusion has completely let up the front. See that? See that platinums coming through? So Roscoe 3008. My favorite diffusion. Super versatile, simply on the roll. Cut a hole for it. Put the camera coming through it. It hides me. It pushes light back on there. I still have a tunnel role left. I usually have one role just dedicated to being a camera. What we call camera whole diffusion. Because after a while, that would get pretty beat up and torn up. We slice it off, we can use what's down below to create another modifier. We can put it on a, you know, a stretcher or whatever, and then we bring it down and we have another space to create these. These things go so long. I think I've had, you know, a roll of this last well over a year. Which is pretty amazing when you think about how many different light modifiers we make out of it. I'm feeling much better about that. You? Yeah, that's what that feels pretty good. What? All right. Um, let's see if we can't cut some holes in the background and start to get some light coming through that background Security. Uh, razor blade. You got one. Let me look through the camera, and I want to figure out where we want to put these. So we probably don't want anything directly over the camera. Right? Probably want to start there anymore. Apple boxes In this studio, there's a ladder broke. There's a ladder, bro. You have a lot of really take those. Yeah, you get you're gonna have to get pretty high. It's kind of fun. I get to sit down, sit down on the job Sometimes if I didn't have a mic back behind me on my belt and probably would go ahead and just lay down