Water – The $10,000 Advert
I’ve had a relatively clear day today, so worked ahead on Strobist bootcamp assignment 4 whilst I had the chance. The Strobist brief was as follows (supposedly a phone call from someone who saw my last assignment) – I’m setting the client to be Strath Lomond:
“Hello. This message is for Phil Phlashen. This is Ms. Whoever from the Strath Lomond bottled water company. We saw your Tracy Watts photos, and wanted to invite you to shoot a photo in our Water Campaign. It is similar to the Absolut Vodka series which ran in the 80′s and 90′s. Our series is just about the water, though. None of those fancy, complicated “homage” shots, please. The photo is up to you, but it should meet the following criteria:
- Vertical – it will run as full page photo in many publications
- No people
- Simple and graphic
- It should make people want to drink our water.
It’s due in one week – 11:59 local time, August 17th. We pay $10,000.00, but you have to supply the water. Hope that’s okay.”
Read on for full details of how I went about putting the shot together…
Having selected the bottle (best looking one on the shelves at Tesco’s!) I set up a glass light table against a matt black, background. This first shot shows the result with ambient light only. To be honest, I quite like this, but to make it fly, we’d have to do some major setup to ensure we got rid of all the reflection sources. Anyway, onwards…
As this water has a feel of the Scottish Highlands about it, I wanted something which would associate with that, whilst also feeling fresh. The colours associated with heather felt right for this, so the plan was to put together a purple/green flavour to the lighting.
A gelled strobe fired from directly above provided the flood of purple light down the background. The first version of the purple lit background was far too smooth, so I decided to fire the strobe through a gobo to add some background interest. Cue your everyday colander, which admirably provided the streaks of purple light I was looking for! I had another sheet of black foam-board at an angle under the glass to pick up the purple light a bit more, and add some variation as the eyes drop down the background.
The next step was to light the bottle itself. This was a two stage process. First, to bring the green into the shot (for that natural feeling of freshness!) That was achieved by firing a green gelled strobe straight up through the bottom of the bottle through the sheet of glass. This was fine, but didn’t quite add enough punch – I wanted a touch more definition to the left and right edges of the bottle. Cue the second part; a final strobe fired from the rear & right, through a small diffuser (commonly known as a sheet of paper!) Minimum power for that strobe was still too much, so I cut it down with a bunch of .3 ND gels.
Put the whole lot together, and you get the finished product (as shown at the top of this post.)
Click on the image to the left for the setup shot.
One final hint – when doing a shot such as this, you need to work hard to keep the dust off. Within minutes of me getting my final shot, fresh dust had already re-settled, and was quite apparent on the setup shots you can see above. So, once it’s clean – work quickly!
Any queries relating to the shoot, feel free to leave a question in the comments below.
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