Took some time over the last few days to set up my mini “home photo studio” — well, it’s really just a 60cm cube, lighting, backdrops and a stand for my camera but it will hopefully make it much easier to photograph new items as they are stocked, including new teas and tea ware, and “Fairy Flowers Spreading” flowering tea pictured here to the left.
I used to find it very difficult to successfully photograph glass ware, however now with my new setup, after spending hours reading up on how to properly photograph glass and having spent as many hours (or more) experimenting, I am now happy with how my photos are coming out. I am certainly not a professional photographer. In fact, I am not even an amateur or hobby photographer. But at least I think the glass tea ware photos look fine. They do not have large areas of glare or reflected light and you can fairly clearly see not only the shape of the tea pot but also the infuser unit inside.
One key was getting the lighting right. I tried photographing some tea pots in the cube with a white and a dark blue background but the reflection of the cube was clearly seen in the tea pots — looked like they were filled with white fluffy balloons… Others had large areas of glare reflecting off, or yours truly with camera shining right back at me!
Finally, the combination I settled with was to set up the cube behind the item with one of the lights sitting inside the cube, shining through the wall onto the item through a double white layer. I placed a white sheet on a glass table, lit from underneath, and a grey gradient sheet of paper on top of that. Using a tripod made all the difference — I manually set the aperture as wide as possible and the result was photos that I am at least not embarrassed with 🙂
I have added a few more glass tea ware products to my online store — please feel free to check out what is available here. If you have any questions regarding the teapots just drop me a note via email or add to the comments section, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Happy tea drinking!