One of the more difficult things to light are glassware and bottles containing liquids. I experimented quite some time before I got something that was reasonable here. I am using a cheap light tent to get an even spread of the lights here and it still took some doing.

I am using two tungsten lights of 50 W each and my SB-600 flash aimed at the background. Camera WB is set for tungsten so the flash becomes very blu-ish in color which was the idea, this masks the creases and wrinkles in the white backdrop for some reason.

The bottle is then mainly lit by the tungsten lights, one from each side, the right one closer to the camera and the left one further away, lighting the botle from the behind-left and front-right at the same time. This seems to be a pretty good setup for this kind of shots.

Here is a different setup. I have now used the SB-600 flash on full power diminishing the light from the tungsten lights. They are still there to provide a small warm colour touch but the main light is now coming from the SB-600.

The flash unit is placed on top to the rear left of the bottle shooting through the light tent. This kind of setup seems also to work very well with the kind of shooting that I was doing here. I also added a glass with some of the Whiskey in it. Which I then drank when I was done with the experiment.

A light tent is something you can get cheap of ebay, I payed about 300 SEK ($50, €20) of Ebay here in Sweden and it came with two 50W tungsten lights on small stands and even a small camera stand although that one was not too useful.

I will write a more thorough article on using the light tent later on.

For these shots I used both the Tamron 90mm f/2.8 Macro and my Nikkor AF 50 mm f/1.8 as they are both pretty good for light tent adventures.