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Chris Nuzzaco - Photography Blog - PHOTOGRAPHY TUTORIAL: Aramis Cologne Splash Ad

Saturday Mar202010

PHOTOGRAPHY TUTORIAL: Aramis Cologne Splash 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 last weeks. The final result is a mock advertisement for Aramis cologne, a very old school cologne from 1965 which is still being sold. My dad recently gave me a bottle of it as a birthday present. So what did I decide to do with it? Of course - photograph it! The finished product is pictured below, complete with the 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 you have on hand, 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 have a cleared place to work in that is at least 7 feet long by 7 feet wide, and 8 feet high. This particular 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 to shoot this in a 7x7x8 foot space.... Photographer beware! This is a wet set - so treat it with respect. Anything running off of AC power should 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, like this. Grip gear - LOTS OF IT. I used 7 stands total, but it is possible you could need 8, I got away with a lucky clamp light cheat, so one stand had two purposes. You might not be so lucky, so plan on using at least 8, if you have softboxes and lots of room, you could actually use less. There's always a few ways to rig any given shot! You will need at least 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 white foam boards you can get at any craft store, or even staples. Two should do fine, though I 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 about that later. At least one flash should be zoomable (ie. "Speedlight"). Flash sync cables with splitter if needed. Black duvetyne 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 version 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. If your bottle isn't clear, 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 180 degree twist that is... This entire photo is shot *UPSIDE DOWN*. You read that correctly. It'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 of sight. A few feet in front of that, rig a stand with a long gobo arm at a 90 degree angle. Place your water catching receptacle underneath this gobo arm. A few more feet in front of the gobo arm setup, rig your camera 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 bubble inside the cologne bottle. It looks horrible! Unless you wanna buy two bottles of the stuff and make sure one is filled to the max, this is a great way to save money. The 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 crazy after 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. I recommend using "A clamps" that are fairly small and fit snugly around the gobo arm while still securely holding 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", your creating surfaces for it to reflect - thus the need for either big softboxes or reflectors. Flashes with modeling lights could come in very handy here, but I was able to manage without them. I had two reflectors to the front left of the bottle that formed a 45 degree angle, and another reflector behind the bottles right side. Both of these reflectors had Adorama AC master slave flashes firing at them, full power. 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 optical slave triggering can go awry very fast with flashes 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 the flashes to expose the frame requires all of them to be hard wired. To do this I used a three way splitter off 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 you'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. Basically soak your sponge in water, then fire off an exposure while you squeeze out the water all over the upside down bottle, but like I said, you need to be careful about this... Pictured below is the basic concept in action.

In order to create that "perfect" splash shot, you actually need to fire off multiple shots, and composite the best parts of them into one seamless shot. I recommend dowsing the bottle first, then firing off a non splash 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 very well in post! I recommend the longer lens earlier because of the splashing that occurs, it can help keep your lens nice and dry if you can back the camera up more.

Post Production
You will need to isolate at least two shots to composite, how many you need, or even can composite will vary quite a bit depending on how your captures came out. The one shot everyone will mostly likely need is the non splash shot. This shot is important because it's the shot that clearly shows the bottles label. 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 shots are chosen, batch process them in camera RAW for best results. Pictured below are the three shots I selected 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 begin compositing the best parts together. This is really one big jig saw puzzle, and its hard to get specific here since everyone will have a unique situation to work with. I do however have some tips to help you along the 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 you brush is super soft, most of the time, this is the best option 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 into one 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 using hard light mode. This process really brings out the contrast, but also desaturates a bit, so I used an adjustment layer to re-saturate just the yellows and reds. After some clone tool and healing brush work to 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 you like my photography, check out my other work available for direct licensing. If you have an account at a major micro stock agency, you can surf on over to my portfolio via this page. If you are in need of a photographer for a commercial assignment, contact me here. | License My Work | Agency Portfolios | Contact | Tutorial Archive

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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 you 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 | suem ack

great tutorial!! i'm gonna try a similar shot dedicated to you! thanks..
March 25, 2010 | learner from m ysore

Cool Stuff! Thanks for sharing. The "up side down" idea is just brilliant!
March 26, 2010 | Mario

If you 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 time I need and feel fine just because of this.
March 26, 2010 | Gw endolyn30Perez

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 | Mckeeim ages

wonderful tuts you have here... i'll try this soon thanks
April 9, 2010 | Leo

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Thanks for providing these tutorials. I really appreciate your sharing your knowledge.
April 14, 2010 | Oscar

Thank you! It's a wonderful tutorial. Gives lots of ideas, how to accomplish some effects. Thanks!
April 16, 2010 | m aigi

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! Thanks for giving us the inside scoop. I have never tried this type of photography but I am interested in it now, because of your tips.
April 29, 2010 | Terri Redm on

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

Em ail: chris@chrisnuzzaco.com Phone: 703 431 6660

Copy right 2010, Christopher Edwin Nuzzaco. All rights reserv ed.

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