Using an £4 LED bulb to light a bottle of Jack Daniels
I’ve been up to some more experimentation, and this time it was to light a bottle using a domestic 8w LED bulb and a dimmer. Usually I use flash lighting that costs thousands but I wanted to prove that something creative can be done with minimal lighting and still look professional.
The Jack Daniels bottle was placed on a nice shiny black card that I found in my local art shop, the LED bulb was wired up to a domestic dimmer and swung around during a 4 seconds exposure to give a trail of light, a small daylight balanced flash head was also fired from behind the bottle to create some extra contrast.
My aim was to make it look like the light was coming into the shot and ‘grabbing’ or ‘enveloping’ the bottle. It was not easy to repeat the swing action with much accuracy so there were many takes, each one resulting in a unique image.
I have added a new gallery to my website for experimental photography, it is still work in progress but here’s the link if you want to have look:
