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SaturdayMar202010

PHOTOGRAPHY TUTORIAL: Aramis CologneSplash Ad

Chris Nuzzaco | Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 10:37PM

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Overview

This weeks tutorial is another challenging shot, a shot I consider to be much more challenging than lastweeks. T he final result is a mock advertisement for Aramis cologne, a very old school cologne from 1965

which is still being sold. My dad recently gav e me a bottle of it as a birthday present. So what did Idecide to do with it? Of course - photograph it! The finished product is pictured below, complete withthe colognes real tag line inserted, "The Impact Never Fades".

Before You Begin

Before you try doing any kind of photo like this, there a few things you want to make sure y ou have onhand, or are capable of doing - otherwise you could end up wasting a lot of your time.

Space! This is probably always a requirement for everything I shoot. Be sure you havea cleared place to work in that is at least 7 feet long by 7 feet wide, and 8 feet high. Thisparticular shot uses a LOT of grip gear, so you'd be wise to find a space much larger

than the bar minimum - crawling around light stands sucks; I know because I had toshoot this in a 7x7x8 foot space.... Photographer beware!This is a wet set - so treat it with respect. Anything running off of AC powershould be plugged into a GFCI protected outlet. Common GFCI outlets in homes would

be anything in a bathroom, kitchen, or located outside. If you don't have any nearby ,you can buy short little pig tail extension cables with GFCI boxes built into them, likethis.Grip gear - LOTS OF IT. I used 7 stands total, but it is possible you could need 8, I gotaway with a lucky clamp light cheat, so one stand had two purposes. You might not beso lucky, so plan on using at least 8, if you have softboxes and lots of room, you couldactually use less. There's always a few ways to rig any given shot! You willneed atleast one gobo arm, and spring loaded clamp. I suggest having several clamps handy.Sturdy camera tripod - absolute must.Softboxes or white reflectors. I went the reflector route and used typical sized whitefoam boards you can get at any craft store, or ev en staples. Two should do fine, thoughI actually used 3.


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3 flashes -All flashes must be capable of high speed sync with your camera!There are a few ways to get around this, and I actually used a few. More details aboutthat later. At least one flash should be zoomable (ie. "Speedlight").Flash sync cables with splitter if needed.Black duvety ne flag, 3x2 1 /2 feet is sufficient in size. This will actually be in the photo,so make sure its in good condition.

A decent pro level DSLR. Why? Flash sync terminal - thats the main reason why.A decently long focal length lens. I used an 85mm 1.4 Nikon lens.Some kind of fish tank or other receptacle with high walls that won't leak water.Big sponge.Pitcher of water.

A cologne bottle - duh! I highly recommend using a splash bottle v ersion of the cologne

if the bottle is clear, or its aftershave companion bottle (I did the later). Why? Simple,that little stem inside the cologne bottle just doesn't look very great. I f your bottle isn'tclear, no need to worry.Photoshop, or some other comparable program.Patience!

Set Rigging

The rigging for this shot is fairly simple and straight forward, except there's a twist, a 1 80 degree twistthat is... This entire photo is shot *UPSI DE DOWN*. You read that correctly. I t's not a typo, I swear!More on this later...

Begin with setting up your black flag first, make sure its high enough up to be in your cameras line ofsight. A few feet in front of that, rig a stand with a long gobo arm at a 90 degree angle. Place your watercatching receptacle underneath this gobo arm. A few more feet in front of the gobo arm setup, rig yourcamera tripod.

Now for this whole upside down business....

Why upside down? There 's a few reasons for this. The main reason is the annoying little air bubbleinside the cologne bottle. It looks horrible! Unless you wanna buy two bottles of the stuff and make sureone is filled to the max, this is a great way to save money. T he second reason, its a GREAT way to fake a

water splash were the bottle appears to be forcing itself up and out of a body of water. See. I 'm not crazyafter all. More on this fake water splash business later...

Take one of your spring loaded clamps, and "hang" your bottle from the gobo arm upside down. Irecommend using "A clamps" that are fairly small and fit snugly around the gobo arm while still securelyholding the cologne bottle. Below is a picture of this "madness".

Notice how the air bubble is now at the bottom of the bottle...


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Lighting

A key thing to remember when shooting anything that is glass is that your not really " lighting it", yourcreating surfaces for it to reflect - thus the need for either big softboxes or reflectors. Flashes withmodeling lights could come in very handy here, but I was able to manage without them. I had tworeflectors to the front left of the bottle that formed a 45 degree angle, and another reflector behindthe

bottles right side. Both of these reflectors hadAdorama AC master slave flashes firing at them, fullpower. The background "glow" was created using a Nikon SB-800 speedlite, which was zoomed in all the

way, and set to light the background up just below the brightness of the foreground.

All the flashes used to light this shot up were hard wired, there's several technical reasons for this.When your working with a lot of reflectors, using opticalslave triggering can go awry very fast withflashes firing out of sync. There is also another issue dealing with high speed sync on my D700 and the

Adorama flashes. In a nutshell the only way I can go past 1/320 a second shutter speed and still get theflashes to expose the frame requires all of them to be hard wired. To do this I used a three way splitteroff the D700's PC sync terminal. My shutterspeed was 1/650 during shooting, which caused about 75%of the frame to be non-exposed since the flashes can't properly sync past 1/320 with the camera.NOTE: My speedlite *can* sync at high speed, but only in remote mode! It's kind of ridiculous :(

Last but not least, make sure y ou're lighting is intense enough too not only support a high shutter speed,but also a deep f/stop. The reason for this is simple, it keeps more of the splashing water in sharp focus.I shot mine at f/9 and was pretty happy with the results. My final lighting setup is pictured below,underexposed on purpose to emphasize the three light sources.

Shooting


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Shooting this image is simple in concept, but you need to be very careful on set when doing it. Basicallysoak your sponge in water, then fire off an exposure while you squeeze out the water all over the upsidedown bottle, but like I said, you need to be careful about this... Pictured below is the basic concept inaction.

In order to create that "perfect" splash shot, you actually need to fire off multiple shots, and compositethe best parts of them into one seamless shot. I recommend dowsing the bottle first, then firing off a nonsplash shot, then proceed to shoot several splashes, and then another non splash shot. Keep in mind you

want the bottle to move as little as possible, otherwise this won't work v ery well in post! I recommendthe longer lens earlier because of the splashing that occurs, it can help keep your lens nice and dry if youcan back the camera up more.

Post Production

You will need to isolate at least two shots to composite, how many you need, or ev en can composite willvary quite a bit depending on how your captures came out. The one shot every one will mostly likelyneed is the non splash shot. This shot is important because it's the shot that clearly shows the bottleslabel. In many splashes, you'll find that the bottles label can become obscured by water or you can see it,

but the optics of the water rushing over it distort it badly and mess with the lighting. Once you're shotsare chosen, batch process them in camera RAW for best results. Pictured below are the three shots Iselected for compositing, post camera RAW processing.


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Once your files are opened in Photoshop, you can now nest all of them into one composition and begincompositing the best parts together. This is really one big jig saw puzzle, and its hard to get specific heresince everyone will have a unique situation to work with. I do however have some tips to help you alongthe way.

Make good use of semi transparent layers. This can help you see what your erasing on one layer,and what you're going to revel from the layer underneath.Feathering is your friend! Make sure y ou brush is super soft, most of the time, this is the bestoption to use.

When you erase, keep on erasing until things just fit. For example, my bottle label didn't look"right" lighting wise until I had erased quite a bit of the layer on top.

Be prepared to make compromises!

Pictured below are my chosen shots after I erased what I didn't want to keep, then finally combined intoone single shot. They are presented in a "top down" order.


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Full composite.

After compositing, I duplicated the layer, desaturated it, then blended it with the color original usinghard light mode. This process really brings out the contrast, but also desaturates a bit, so I used anadjustment layer to re-saturate just the yellows and reds. After some clone tool and healing brush workto clean up some of the stray splashes I didn't like, and inserting the the Aramis tag line, I was finished!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Feel free to comment below. If y ou like my photography, check out myother workavailable for direct licensing. If you have an account at a major micro stock agency, you cansurf on over to my portfolio via this page. If y ou are in need of a photographer for a commercialassignment, contact me here.

| License My Work | Agency Portfolios | Contact | Tutorial Archive


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26 Comments | Email Article | Share Article | Permalink | in Photography Tutorials

Reader Comments (26)

I can't believe no one has commented yet -- but wow! I don't do this type

of photography, but kudos to you for what y ou accomplished with this

shot, and for showing others how to get the same result. The final photo is

wonderful!

March 22, 2010 | Jenny

Great Tips, Thanks.

March 22, 2010 | archeev2

GREAT tutorial.

But dark grey text on black? C'mon, help us out here ;)

March 22, 2010 | Jonathan Ryan

greta love it, nice to see a in depth tutorial, will have a look around your

site some more, I found this link on microstockgroup and have

bookmarked you, Im going to have a go at this myself soon, thanks!

March 22, 2010 |jo

What an excellent tutorial. Nicely written and not at all confusing.

March 22, 2010 | BeccaG

Very cool photo tutorial. Thanks for sharing.

March 22, 2010 | kelvinjay

Very informative, thanks for sharing the info.

Best

March 23, 2010 | Shahi

Very well written, illustrated and presented in a logical doable way.

Thanks. Your comment about your dad giving you a cologne from the '60's

made me chuckle, my dad did too.

March 23, 2010 | Ray


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it was really quite interesting and informative. Loved reading it

March 24, 2010 | hassan

Thank you for this tutorial Chris I found it most informative very well

written.

Regards

March 24, 2010 | Jim Clarke

Nice work. Would be cool to figure out a way to show the whole bottle.

March 24, 2010 | fuego

Fuego, you could show the whole bottle if you had two of them - one to

steal liquid from to "super" fill the other so you don't have the annoying air

bubble. As for rigging it, you'd probably just need to get a bit more

creative, like having a black rod with strong adhesive holding the bottle in

the upside down position.

March 24, 2010 | Chris Nuzzaco

Excellent tutorial! Thank you!!

March 25, 2010 | suemack

great tutorial!! i'm gonna try a similar shot dedicated to y ou! thanks..

March 25, 2010 | learner from mysore

Cool Stuff! Thanks for sharing.

The "up side down" idea is just brilliant!

March 26, 2010 | Mario

If y ou are in the corner and have no cash to move out from that point, you

will need to take the loans. Just because that would aid you for sure. I get

bank loan every t ime I need and feel fine just because of this.

March 26, 2010 | Gwendolyn30Perez

I love it when someone takes the time to give the "Inside story" on how

they do it.

Too many people keep their cards close to their chest.

More power to you Chris.

Post some more for us.

Thanks

April 7, 2010 |Mckeeimages

wonderful tuts you have here...

i'll try this soon

thanks

April 9, 2010 |Leo


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ww chrisnuzzaco com/blog/2010/3/20/photography-tutorial-aramis-cologne-splash-ad html

Thanks for providing these tutorials. I really appreciate your sharing your

knowledge.

April 14, 2010 | Oscar

Thank y ou! It's a wonderful tutorial. Gives lots of ideas, how to accomplish

some effects. Thanks!

April 16, 2010 | maigi

nice tips for a beginner like me.... :)

April 19, 2010 | neil

Wow. That's so cool. This reminds me of one photo tutorial somebody did,

just like this, but it was a shot of a rowpool fountains. It was so

creatively and vividly done that you could actually see the waterdrops

falling from the fountains, creating cool spectrum and other cool effects.

April 22, 2010 | ChrisMandella

This is great! T hanks for giving us the inside scoop. I have nev er tried this

type of photography but I am interested in it now, because of your tips.

April 29, 2010 | Terri Redmon

Found your link on PSE forum. Nice tutorial. Interesting technique.

Who'da thunk?

May 1, 2010 | Shirley Tyldesley

This is great. I've been trying to find step by step video or blog about how

the pros set these things up. Thanks!

June 28, 2010 | PinkNoire

it's like HDR! very simple and creative.

November 2, 2010 | terrence

Email:[email protected]

Phone: 703 431 6660

Copyright 2010, Christopher Edwin Nuzzaco. All rights reserv ed.

chris nuzzaco - photography blog - photography tutorial_ aramis cologne splash ad

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