New Water Still Life

I've started a new project based around Still Life and Fragrance specifically. While in this project, I'm not necessarily shooting the bottles for the brand, I'm exploring creatively what I can do with light, shadow, and sets to create unique visuals that showcase the beauty of the bottles in those environments.

Usually, the fragrance bottle gets shot on white or black and then cut out and put on some lifestyle image that represents what the brand is going for. Photographically and creatively, I think this approach falls short. This works and does convey the brand's message, but I feel that they spend so much time and money creating these beautiful bottles for the fragrance, that the photograph of the bottle ends up being an uninspiring secondary visual.

My goal in this project is to find unique ways of shooting and showing off the bottles in an environment either natural or a set built for it. I think that if I let the background show through and let the bottle become a part of it's evironment, then it will become a more interesting visual that the usual boring cutout...

Gucci's Flora:
The fun part about Flora is that the bottle has a unique shape and takes on whatever colors you put behind it. For a subject it's great as you can really do anything with it. I have an empty 110 gallon fish tank that is not being used right now, so I thought I'd have some fun with water drops. It's all timing and lighting here. I think it took about 40 drops before before I got just the right angle and bubbles. You can never go wrong with water and still life. Every shot is unique and can never really be recreated, so you just have to limit the factors that could make for a bad shot and have great timing to catch it.


Marc Jacobs' Daisy:
I took some artistic license with this one as the bottle has some very unique white flowers on top of the bottle. I knew that if it were backlit, it would create a very dramatic silhouette, while lighting the bottle's distinctive yellow liquid and branding. Part of creating the look was using a snoot to spotlight just the bottle so that the light dropped off dramatically on the right, silhouetted the rocks and top of the bottle. I left the bubbles on the flowers intentionally as I thought it added something unique to the shot.



More to come...up next Givenchy and Escada's Ocean Lounge.