365/12 - Day 23 - Light refreshments

3

I was given this bottle of Gold Cuvee, sparkling white wine with edible gold flakes, as a leaving present from a project with Royal Mail that I had been working on. The neat thing about this wine is that the 22 carat gold flakes float in the wine and take a good minute or so to settle.... You will see why that's useful in a second. Clearly the interesting thing for me, apart from the emotional sentiment, in all these photos was the lighting. I was modelling and creating a version of reality, shaping the world around with some very simple lighting techniques.

Where as this is still not "true reality", as the flash and umbrella have been placed there, this IS possible in terms of physics, this is not an imaginary PhotoShop world. Having said that I'm also not reporting the real world, I'm creating/visualising an idea or picture in my head in the real world. I'm Telling a story.

Before you read further, see if you can work out where the lights are.
The lighting set up for this is actually straight forward, there are two lights being used. One is, quite clearly, behind the bottle shooting into the reflective side of my umbrella, its being remotely triggered by my cheap eBay RF triggers. I can't remember what the settings are, but looking at the amount of light coming out I'd vote 1/8 or a 1/16.

So where is the second light? Well its just off to camera right, but is being bounced of a wall and flagged to channel the light the way I wanted it to go. It also has a 1/2 CTO gel on it to give some contrast to the other "bare" flash. (You can see this more in the second photo). If you look carefully the second light is lighting up the gold flakes (otherwise they'd be in silhouette from the first light).


I also love the fact that you can get such a range of photos from the same set up.