SHOOTING STEPS

1 Lay out your props

Find a surface to shoot your items on that has neutral qualities and a plain background. Where possible, create depth by arranging props at different distances from the camera, to suggest an environment larger than your kitchen! Avoid regimented layouts – introduce some randomness.

2 Set camera height

The level of your camera is important, as it controls depth of field and how much background is visible. Here, we wanted to see a focus fall-off behind the subject but shot slightly downwards to include the shimmer of light shining through the bottle.

3 Crop tightly

Zoom in to exclude all of the extraneous details of your home. The aim is to create a new context for your subject, so control this with the frame boundaries. Shooting at f/2.8-3.5 limits focus, while the focal length compresses the scene.

4 Set lighting

Since we’re working in a confined area, the flash power shouldn’t be set too high, or it will flood the scene and overexpose highlights, especially in glass items such as this. Here, 1/64 power was enough to overpower the warm ambient light.

5 Cut ambient light

Lower the ISO and increase the shutter speed to give the flash illumination more dominance. This doesn’t mean that the scene will get darker necessarily, just that you have more control over global lighting. Now the ambient light is barely visible, so you can adjust all areas of the scene.

6 Shoot multiple variations

Since there is only one flash, you can’t light multiple areas simultaneously. With the camera stationary on a tripod, take multiple frames with a new flash position in each, to produce different effects. Here we also moved the foreground foliage around between each shot for later blending in software.