Glass and "blanks"

[Mr Guy]

One of the things I like to do when I finally get time to practice my photography and don't have specific ideas is to look over some of my friends "Wish lists" on modelmayhem and use them as starting points to imitate and deconstruct the elements. One of the girls I shot with a while back wanted some of those heavily photoshopped smoke/liquid and body kinda pictures. Since I won't be able to shoot with her for a bit, I'm trying to practice working with the blanks so I'll have the backdrop ready to drop her in.

I just wanted some critique and suggestions for things to play with. I shot some smoke from incense, which was pretty and relatively straightforward. I can mess with the light effects, but it seemed pretty easy to get the intense neon light colors with gels, and intense smoke swirls just by putting the camera on a tripod and blowing or waving my hands around to get pretty vortexes. I can easily picture how I'd run this up someone's leg:




Because I didn't want to just do EXACTLY what she asked for, I thought of similar ideas that would look fun and different but have the same process. I thought it'd be fun to have a model "shrunk" into a champagne glass, drenched, feebly trying to protect themselves using fruit as an umbrella. Kinda like your standard "waterfall" glamor shots, but with drinks.

So this is a blank I prepped:


Ok, glass is difficult. Glass and pouring liquids, for me, was VERY difficult. Here's what I did. I started with a copy of Light: Science and Magic, and rigged up their example lighting as a starting point. I put the glass on the side of a wooden table, with a black gobo taped to the edge and arching up behind. Behind the black paper is my Alien Bees B800 ring flash. I tried to add some color and highlights with a yellow gelled Metz 48, snooted and aimed right at the glass.

I put green florist's wire through some raspberries, made a loop in the end of the wire, and hung it around the neck of a bottle of ginger ale. The wire helped me aim and held the raspberries up "floating" in the middle of the glass, so I could make sure I hit them and got the umbrella effect.

Ok. My thoughts:

1) I need another key light to brighten the fruit and the front, and maybe some spectral highlights.

2) I need to put a full backdrop paper behind the camera, because the edge reflections from the window are still creeping around. The angle for the reflections is much wider than I anticipated.

Anything else? Anyone got some suggestions on how to make the drink portion of the blank more luscious and inviting?