Personal Project in Studio

Working in the studio is also a fantastic part in my photography career. Studio shooting is more creative and more suffering compared with the outside exploring. I’ve worked on many different types of projects that have expanded my experience and added to my portfolio.

I would like to share the experience in a personal photography project last year. I was assigned to photograph a perfume in studio. The assignment required me to make the perfume look fancy and attractive to customers. In my studio plan, there were no edges between foreground and background and there were lights that shone from bottom and back to make the glass look like crystal.

But the school studio lacked the equipment to support my idea. I did not have long reflective plastic to make the smooth background. Through experiments, I used a glass to create the shadow of perfume and used canvas as background. However, every setting did not work well, the edge of the small glass ruined the composition and the canvas had many wrinkles which distracted the viewer. No good picture came out, after I struggled for 4 hours. I frustrated and I found my professor who suggested I should not restrict my ideas in a cube.

The edge of small glass was so annoying at first, but if I could not avoid it, I could still use the edge to be a line to help the composition of the whole picture. I put the perfume at the corner of the glass which created a eye-line to lead the attention of audience to the perfume. I got rid of my old idea and I wanted to add some passion to the product. The blank and smooth background no longer worked. I used dry ice and deep orange light to create a fire behind the perfume. The whole picture became dynamic and the fire was so realistic that everyone thought it was real.