Lighting Glass: Product Photography in Studio — A Bourbon Series

What does it take to photograph a bottle of bourbon well? We didn't know when we started. Two days, four setups, and somewhere north of 800 frames later, we had our answer — and a five-image carousel that we're genuinely proud of.

This is the story of how we built it.

Studio Product Photography: The Setup

No client. No deadline. Just a bottle of 1792 Small Batch bourbon, a wood surface, and a question: can Estudio Forja deliver commercial-quality product photography?

We set out to create a five-image carousel — each shot a different surface, a different mood, a different technique. The constraint was that we had never shot a product like this before. Everything we know comes from portrait and fashion work. The lighting principles transfer. The specific challenges of glass, liquid, and reflective surfaces do not.

We were starting from zero.

Setup 1: The Lay Flat

The first setup was the simplest conceptually and the most iterative in practice. The bottle lying flat on a hand-cut parota wood surface, camera mounted overhead on a boom arm, shooting straight down.

The wood was the right call immediately — the warm grain tones and organic ring patterns created a natural halo around the bottle that felt intentional rather than accidental. What took time was the light.

The first problem was a hard shadow falling across the surface. We introduced a Lee 216 diffusion scrim on the fill side to soften it. The scrim solved the shadow but created a new problem — a hard white specular reflection on the curved glass face of the bottle. We pulled the scrim further back, then switched from a white card to the full scrim as our fill source. The larger, more distant source created a reflection too gradual to read as a discrete hotspot.

It took the better part of an afternoon to find the balance. The final frame is a single capture — no compositing, no exposure blending. Just light, glass, and wood.

Setup 2: The Lifestyle Shot

The second setup introduced props and narrative. The bottle upright on the same parota surface, a crystal glass with a small pour of tea standing in for bourbon, the Gravity Backdrops hand-painted backdrop behind.

The lighting approach carried over from the lay flat — scrim on bottle left with a strip box behind it to create a graduated highlight across the bottle face, white card on bottle right for subtle fill. What changed was the challenge of lighting two subjects simultaneously. The glass and the bottle have different geometries and different specular characteristics. What works for one creates problems for the other.

The crystal glass required its own consideration — too much light and the facets blow out, too little and it disappears into the background. The final position, slightly behind and to the left of the bottle, let it catch enough light to sparkle without competing for attention.

The wood surface caught a warm pool of light at the base that anchored the composition. That wasn't planned. It just happened, and we left it.

Setup 3: Black Acrylic

The black acrylic setup was the most technically demanding of the series. The goal was a clean mirror reflection — the bottle and its perfect inverted twin living simultaneously in the same frame.

Acrylic surfaces are unforgiving. Every light source in the room is a potential contamination. Every fingerprint shows. Every piece of equipment within the reflection angle needs to be flagged or repositioned. We spent the first hour just getting the surface clean and the environment controlled.

The lighting approach was similar to the lifestyle setup — scrim on bottle left, strip box behind the scrim to create graduated illumination across the scrim face, white card fill on bottle right. The difference was that every modifier now had two jobs: light the bottle and not destroy the reflection below it.

The final image has an unexpected element — diagonal light streaks across the bottle face created by the scrim's diffusion material reflecting in the glass at a specific angle. We considered correcting it. We left it. It gives the image an almost holographic quality that feels contemporary and intentional.

Setup 4: The Low Angle Hero

The final setup was the simplest in concept and the most dramatic in result. Same bottle, same parota wood surface, camera dropped low — almost to table level — shooting up at a slight angle rather than straight on.

The low angle does something no other camera position can: it makes the bottle monumental. That wide squat body and distinctive neck read completely differently from ground level. The bottle stops being an object and starts being a presence.

The lighting remained consistent with the previous setups — scrim controlling the left face, fill on the right, the warm wood surface catching raking light beneath. What changed was everything the camera saw. The background compressed. The bottle filled the frame differently. The grain of the wood became a foreground element rather than a surface.

Sometimes the most powerful adjustment you can make has nothing to do with the lights.

What We Learned

Three days. Four setups. Somewhere north of a 800 frames. Here is what stayed with us.

Glass is honest. It shows you exactly what your light is doing, where it's coming from, and whether you've thought it through. There is nowhere to hide with a transparent bottle on a reflective surface. Every mistake is visible. That's not a problem — it's a feedback mechanism. We made faster progress because of it.

One light at a time. Every time we added a new source without fully understanding the previous one, we created problems we couldn't diagnose. Every time we built the setup incrementally — lock one light, evaluate, add the next — we moved forward. This sounds obvious. It isn't, when you're standing in a studio and the shot isn't working and the temptation is to add more.

The surface is half the image. The parota slab, the black acrylic, the painted backdrop — each one changed the character of the image as much as any lighting decision. Choosing your surface is a creative act, not a logistical one.

Happy accidents are real. The light streaks on the acrylic shot. The warm pool of light on the wood surface in the lifestyle shot. The way the pipe just worked. None of these were planned. All of them made the images better. You create the conditions for accidents by building a thoughtful setup. Then you have the presence of mind to recognize them when they happen.

Product photography is slow photography. Coming from portraits, where energy and instinct drive the session, the pace of product work is a different discipline entirely. Deliberate. Methodical. Iterative. We like it.