Today I would like to show you how I took this picture at a bar for the drink menu.
Final Picture
This is the set general view. Just two symmetrical strobes with narrow softboxes. You just have to try different angles to get the desired reflection in the glasses and bottles.
Setup general view
The only problem was that the shooting was at daytime with a lot of natural light coming in.
Available light
When I kill the natural light for the drinks (using a combination of aperture and shutter speed) and I use my strobes to light the drinks, I am killing the artificial light from the background shelf too and it looks boring and poor. I wanted to keep some light in the background in order to have some reflections so I set the aperture to get the depth of field that I wanted (f5.6) and I set the shutter speed to 1/80. The result was this.
Just with the strobes to light the drinks
Then what I did was to hide a couple of speedlites behind the bottles at the shelf. I used a blue and a red gel to add some color to the background.
The result was good but I founded some reflections at the background that were very distracting for me.
I used some snoots to cover those areas (you can use black clothes, boards or whatever, I use these snoots because I always carry them, check the post "My Equipment" for more information).
In this diagram you can see the technical gear info.
Like always in this kind of photography I sprayed water with glycerine over the glasses with cold drinks to make them look more fresh.
For this shooting I think it is very important to have a precise control of the depth of field. To get it I use a laser meter combine with an iPhone app called iDoF Calc. You can find more information in my post "My Equipment".
The post edition of this picture in Photoshop was very simple. I just rid off some reflections and I did some dodge and burn.
Do you have any question? Just ask me :-)