Cointreau

I found this old bottle of Cointreau in my basement (from my dad) and I liked the thick square shape of the bottle. I thought I could do something nice with my cubes in a glass beside the bottle. My brother was visiting and he just started photography so this was a perfect time to test product photography with him.

So here's the setup:

I chose the computer room because of the light brown walls. I wanted a nice light brown background to compliment the colors of the bottle. I used the TV glass stand as a platform for a clean look. We have one light source from the left with an umbrella, another pointing at the wall for that spotlight look and a gold reflector to bounce back some light on the bottle and glass. The gold really worked well here with the browns of the scene.

Now I don't drink much, especially liquors so I had no idea Cointreau was clear liquor until we pored some in the glass. I was so disappointed. Luckily, I had some Grand Marnier and that liquor is a nice dark brown.

This was shot with my Fujifilm X-T20 + Rokinon 50mm 1.2. This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color) with a 4:3 crop:

I only noticed that bad reflection on the glass after I was in Lightroom. Also, a longer focal length or being closer would've been better. I used a radial filter on the bottle and the glass to make them pop without affecting the rest of the picture. The big difference in colors comes from the white balance adjustment.

This time I made sure to have the glass top clean and I used my camera air blower to blow as much dust off as possible and there was still some dust I had to remove with the spot removal tool.

We made a funny discovery. We were using my brother's DSRL (T7i) and I initially had the shutter at 1/160s. I cranked it up to 1 sec so I could focus better with live view but I didn't set it back to 1/160s when I took my next shot. I was pleasantly surprised by how much better it looked. There's a window coming from the left and the light fill in the shadows nicely.

50mm 1s F/9 ISO 200

Despite the bad reflection, I'm still happy with this shot. The colors are nice and I'm happy with the lighting.