The Making of: Candlelit Bottles

For this shot, I knew I wanted most of the light to come from the candles. My goal was to make a very moody shot. In order to achieve this look, I used continuous lights and bounced them off white foam boards. I had to place the lights pretty far away so as to not ruin the look I was going for.

For the set-up, the first thing I had to figure out was the positioning of the objects. I didn’t want to make it look too crowded but I also didn’t want it to look empty. Before I even set the lights up, I positioned them many different ways before I came up with the final one. The next step was to figure out the lighting. As I said above, I bounced the light off some boards and scooted them about 20 feet away from the subjects. I took some exposure test shots before I lit the candles. Then I had to take more exposure test shots because the light had changed slightly.

I bracketed my exposures as I took the photos and as I was doing that, the air conditioning unit decided to blow right onto the candles. I thought they were going to blow out but instead, the air was pushing smoke into the jugs. This both helped and hindered me. At first I didn’t want any smoke in them, but as it dissipated, I liked the effect. Therefore, I decided to not worry about it and picked the best photo from the brackets based on the overall look, not the smoke.

I like how the shot turned out. The only thing I would’ve done differently is brought the table forward a lot more so the background wouldn’t be lit up at all. Then it would have looked more moody and dark.