Glass project Write up

In This project we were asked to produce 2 Final Images of Glass, Experimenting with different lighting set-ups and different types of glass. This Project was tricky because Glass is Very Reflective, so you have to think about how your lights are interacting with it and a what angles the Glass is going to reflect into the camera. With Glass also being Refractive it can look almost invisible if you don’t get any reflection. So balancing the two to get a nice image was tricky, and toke a lot of trial and error as well as post processing.

For this project I Researched Photographers Like, Juan Jose Garcia, Reto Imhof and Jose Maria Frutos. I also looked at Artists like, Skrob and Marcello Barenghi. It was hard to find any Photographers Famous for photographing glass, and the ones by lesser know artists like the ones mentioned appealed to me more then some others. The reason I looked at Drawers and painters is because they don't necessarily Draw what they see, they draw whats appealing and looks good. an Image can be realistic without being possible in the real world. Although a painter might be working of a photograph, they can remove or add things the photographer couldn't to make the image look better. photography doesn't always have to be about what you see, but (like the painters) what you want to see.

The main Focus of this project was lighting. We used 3 different Lighting set-ups. One involved placing the object over a hole in the table and shooting a light through said hole. This Lighting setup is good for Glass objects with interior detail because the light reflects of them making them visible to the camera. The other lighting setup placed a light behind a translucent white object this created a very soft light that was very even and so was good for glass which was very smooth with not much detail. The third lighting set up lit the glass from the rim. The was achieved by bouncing the light of a white background placed behind the black background the Glass was placed on. The black background was big enough to fill the camera frame but small enough for the light to reach the glass.

Over all I think this project challenged my ability to light in a studio environment. I had to adapted to a new material that reacts differently because its highly reflective and refractive. I learned new lighting setups which help overcome the problems that you could face if lighting glass in the way you would normally light a more Diffuse object.