Wine on the rocks with a straw

[Mike Buckley]

This is my fourth image in a series titled Wine Incongruity. You have to have a sense of humor to enjoy it.

Setup
The tabletop is clear glass and the background is textured art paper. First photo: A small continuous-light lamp lit the background from below. The bright light reflecting off the background acted as a bright field that defined most of the edges of the drinking glass and ice in dark tones. A strip softbox touching a diffusion panel of translucent vellum at a 45-degree angle on the right side was fitted with a speed light. It added gradient reflections to the right side of the bottle and the drinking glass. Second photo: A medium continuous-light lamp fitted with a diffusion sock positioned at the right front corner lit the wine label. The exposure made better reflections in the tabletop than the first photo. The photos were merged.

[flashback]

First let me say that I gloss over your technical explanations as they are way too far over my head. To your image, I think it's great. The idea of a straw (especially a bendy straw) in a glass of wine is quite the faux pas. My only concern is that the background causes the wine to appear a pale green. Was that your intent? Maybe another in house joke?

[bnnrcn]

Very nice composition but I wouldn't like to try wine with ice and a straw at all. I like the texture and color of BG very much, it also becomes brighter towards the bottom of the frame and I like the gradient filter-like effect. I just wonder why you didn't include the top of the bottle in the frame , too tall to fit? White dot-like things in the reflection of the bottle distracts a bit, I would clone some of it but it is personal preference really.

[Shadowman]

Nice composition.

[Donald]

I think your work with light is a good lesson for anyone looking to develop skills in still-life photography. It is indeed all about the light.

[Whistletown Wilds]

Your shots are amazing You put a lot of work and it shows !

[Rob Ekins]

I agree with Donald, I get a great deal out of studying your images and notes.

In response to Binnurs point about composition, is the top of the bottle not part of the image because it has been opened and the contents are in the glass? My reasoning behind this assumption is that I can not see a fluid level line within the bottle, one may be there but buggered if I can see it.

I am also intrigued by the red reflection on the bottom of the CL piece of ice. Is that a distorted reflection of the label or something out side of the scene?

[Mike Buckley]

Thank you, everyone!

the background causes the wine to appear a pale green. Was that your intent? Maybe another in house joke?

Definitely my intent. I could have lit a larger area of the background more brightly or I could have made a third shot using a white background to render the wine and glass like this other incongruity. You're right that it's a joke that some of the wine appears green (though there are also some yellow tones). Ironically, it's also the realism that when we drink wine at the dinner table, its color is influenced by background colors exactly the same way as in this photo even though we're not aware of it at the time.

I gloss over your technical explanations as they are way too far over my head.

You might prefer to ignore them. That information is by far the least important part of the entire thread as far as I'm concerned, though I appreciate that different people have different interests. If I don't provide that information in the first post, someone invariably asks for it. Each thread usually contains at least one person thanking me for posting the information, so I got in the habit of doing that quite awhile ago.

I just wonder why you didn't include the top of the bottle in the frame , too tall to fit? White dot-like things in the reflection of the bottle distracts a bit, I would clone some of it but it is personal preference really.

Both choices were personal decisions. I got rid of many distractions in the drinking glass but like those reflections of the bottle in the tabletop that you mention. Another viable choice would have been to eliminate the lower set of reflections of the dots. One characteristic of clear glass and standard mirror tabletops is that a double reflection is produced. Sometimes I like that, sometimes not, depending on the subject and type of reflection.

As for the bottle, I used to believe that the top of everything had to be included in a scene including outdoor scenes to convey height until I finally learned that it's usually conveyed better if part of that is left up to the viewer's imagination. Having said that, it would have been quite difficult to include the top of the bottle because of the limited size of my background material; if I had moved the background closer to make it possible to include all of the bottle, the texture of the background would have been more in focus than I preferred.

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks, Rob!

In response to Binnurs point about composition, is the top of the bottle not part of the image because it has been opened and the contents are in the glass? My reasoning behind this assumption is that I can not see a fluid level line within the bottle...

You're correct that the bottle is empty. The glass is also nearly empty. Those two characteristics are by design. However, my reason for omitting the top of the bottle doesn't have anything to do with that. My reasoning is explained in my previous post, which I was writing as you were writing yours.

I am also intrigued by the red reflection on the bottom of the CL piece of ice. Is that a distorted reflection of the label or something out side of the scene?

That's difficult to see at the small size displayed here but at a larger size it's clear that those details are refracted reflections of the straw. Now that you know what to look for, you may be able to see that for yourself if you click the image twice to view it at the uploaded size.

By the way, if you saw my makeshift studio, which was designed essentially as a black tent, you would realize that there will never be any unwanted reflections of objects outside the scene.

[Mike Buckley]

I forgot to add a note about the green tone of the wine mentioned by Jack. My wife really objects to that, which clearly provides ample documentation that she simply doesn't "get it."

[Rob Ekins]

refracted reflections

Thanks Mike,

That makes sense now, I did look at all sizes but refraction never occurred to me. In my mind I only saw a reflection..

Thanks for clearing that up

[Mike Buckley]

The idea of a straw (especially a bendy straw)

I forgot to mention a detail about that. It was a complete stroke of luck that I had a wine label and straw that are the same color. It was even greater luck that this wine label displays the letter "K" so prominently. I tried to make the end of the straw parallel to the lower right part of the "K" but never figured out a way to make that happen. Even if I had been successful, it's probably a level of detail that few people would have noticed but it's the kind of detail that enters my mind when I'm designing a scene.

[Mike Buckley]

It just now occurred to me that I should mention for people interested in doing this kind of photography that the ice is handmade acrylic; no two pieces are exactly alike and the quality works well for photos that display the ice more up close than this photo.

The ice is rather expensive, which explains why three cubes appeared on last year's Christmas list. If I had bought the cubes myself, the cost would have been entered into our personal finance program as a photography expense. That doesn't play as well with my wife as listing it as a gift expense.

[AlwaysOnAuto]

And that explains to me how you managed to get two shots with the ice not changing due to melting.
Nice work and I appreciate the explanations too.

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks, Alan!

And that explains to me how you managed to get two shots with the ice not changing due to melting.

There might be other situations when that would be important (I really don't know) but in this situation it wouldn't have mattered if the ice had melted. That's because I used the label and tabletop reflections of one photo and copied them to the other photo.

Ironically, the major reason to use the acrylic cubes is that they are clearer than real ice that I would normally produce on my own. Clear (transparent) ice makes a more appealing photo than unclear (translucent) ice, at least in the style that I like to make. Producing real, transparent ice is relatively difficult.

[TonyW]

Nice. I was going to complain about the colour of the wine before I got the joke.

[Mike Buckley]

Nice. I was going to complain about the colour of the wine before I got the joke.

Go ahead and complain anyway.