Kens Photography Blog

I’m currently gnawing my way though the amazing book Light Science and Magic and finally learned how to light glass and glass objects using a technique called Bright Field and Dark Field Lighting.

If you’ve ever tried to take a nice photo of some glassware and just got horribly bad results then these techniques will make you jump with glee.

See, you can’t really light glass because either it’s transparent and the light will just shoot right through the glass and all you’ll get is some ugly reflections on the glass, or it’s translucent and you will have problems with glare, ugly specular highlights and a headache.

What you do is simple. Light up a bright background behind the glass if the glass is transparent instead of the glass itself. Since the glass is transparent, you will see the light through the glass, or rather, you will see the reflection of the light you shine on the background. In order to get edge definition just turn off all ambient light in the room. Because of light falloff (Inverse square law) and the family of angles, even though the background behind the glass is bright, the glass will see the light in the room as very dark (Can’t trust your eyes here, the room will look bright to you, but not the glass and the camera) and that darkness will be reflected in the edges of the glass giving you nice edge definition.

For lighting glass on a dark/black background, just light up the background again. Now put a black piece of cardboard a little bit larger than the glass, behind the glass. Start with the glass right up to the black cardboard, then move it away and look what happens. When the glass gets far enough away from the black cardboard, the family of angles of the bright background reflection, will hit the edges of the glass and give you a nice bright edge on the glass.

There’s so much amazing lighting knowledge in the Light Science and magic book that any serious photographer should have this book on the top of their wish-list.