Green Beer

At a local food shop I saw some very nice looking imported beer bottles, so I decided to buy a few for my G1. Odd thing happened: G1 took the pictures with pleasure but it was me who had to drink the beer afterwards. The green bottle is, as you can see, St. Peters Organic Ale, and the red one on the left is 'Later Red Autumn Hop Ale' from Shepherd Neame, Great Britain. There were other bottles, too, in my 'beer studio' that evening, but this combination of colors was the most pleasing to my eye of all dozens of pictures I took. Hardest thing about shooting glass is controlling the highlights and still keep the glass transparent. Also, the label was less reflective than the glass so there was a very narrow exposure area to work with. I had a very dim room (one lamp 80cm away): The Speedlite 550EX (manual 1/2 power) was on my G1, bounced back and up, and a slaved Metz 28C-2 was behind the bottles on a very low setting with extra diffuser. I kept some highlights out by keeping a dark hankerchief on air in front of the lamp on the table. I wanted to avoid overexposure of highlights, so I underexposed a little and raised end level in Photoshop Levels dialog from 255 to 220. I also removed two or three black pixels which were the results of the G1's noise reduction (noise increases with heated CCD so even noise reduction could have problems with it). A lot of work for a simple image like this, but in my opinion worth it.