Beer Product

I think product or commercial photography is really neat and I was inspired by this picture:

I knew this would be difficult so I searched on YouTube for help and found many videos like this one:

To be honest, I was disappointed. I'm not against Photoshop to remove annoyances or enhancing your pictures but when adding different backgrounds, reflections, and effects, it's not photography skills anymore, it's graphic design skills. They still look amazing though.

I want to be able to reproduce that shot as much as possible with 1 shot. I knew I would be needing 4 lights so my good friend Joel came over to help me. So here's the setup:

We have 2 flashes on each side, one on the bottom with green gels and one handheld pointing at the bottle. My TV stand uses black glass so I used that for my platform. I have a circular reflector with a black side but it's wrinkled so we couldn't use that. We ended up using the backside of a computer chair. I might purchase or make a black cardboard for future use.

The 2 side lights are there to create those nice side highlights. We used umbrellas to have a bigger light source to highlight the whole bottle.

For the background light, make sure your white balance is set correctly. With my Fujifilm X-T20, I could pick the exact color I wanted which is really cool.

Now, that front light. We had a lot of difficulties trying to light the bottle evenly. The best we found was just above the camera. Here's a tip: scrape off the back label. The flash will bounce off it. We also tried to place cutout piece of paper behind the bottle so the flash would illuminate inside the bottle but it made the beer look yellow. We preferred this more dramatic dark look.

So here's the equipment list we used with their setting:

Fujifilm X-T20 + Rokinon 50mm 1.2

Left flash: Yongnuo YN565EX (24mm 1/32)

Right flash: Yongnuo YN560 III (24mm 1/32)

Bottom flash: SunPack 622 Super + 2 green gels (??mm 1/32)

Top flash: Yongnuo YN 560 (105mm 1/128)

This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color):

Because of limited equipment, I needed to do a lot of touching up afterward with GIMP. My biggest disappointment is the background light because it's not even but overall I'm very pleased with the result. I'm not a professional and this was my first attempt. I tried to shoot at F/8 but you could see more imperfections in the background.

50mm 1/125s F/5.6 ISO 200