Image of the Week: The Pour

This week's image is more about the technique than the subject. Sure, the subject is nice: when I see a column of red wine pouring into a glass, I think of nothing else but smoky flavors, italian meats, red sauces, and thick, juicy steaks. But I'm not here to discuss the gourmet side. Instead, I want to focus on the technical minutiae that went into this shot, because bagging it wasn't as easy as you might think.

Before we get to all of that, I want to come clean: I didn't actually use red wine for this image.

Most of the wines I tested were too dark to create the rich, backlit effect I wanted, and all of them frothed heavily when poured from the height needed to crop the pitcher out of the photo. And honestly, I didn't want to waste a ton of delicious wine. I substituted grape juice and added a bit of Karo Syrup to control the frothing. Trust me: when faced with a similar dilemma, you'd have done the same.

I wanted to freeze the wine pour in action; to have the column of liquid take on the appearance of an acrylic sculpture without it looking synthetic or sterile. To do that, I needed more than just a fast shutter speed -- I needed fast strobes.

When you vary a strobe's power, what you're actually doing is telling the strobe how long to emit light. A strobe doesn't actually get brighter when you crank it up to eleven, it just stays on longer. My standard studio monolights weren't up to the task. To produce the light output I needed for this shot, their flash duration was far too long, and the resulting photos showed noticeable motion blur.

So I turned to my bag of Nikon hotshoe flashes: two SB-25 and two SB-26 strobes. I remembered from Nikon product literature that these flashes have a duration as fast as 1/23,000 of a second at their lowest power setting, more than enough speed to catch the pouring liquid.

All four strobes were gaffer-taped together and shoved into the speedring of a softbox that served as the background. I had to use all four to produce the light required to shoot at ƒ/11. With a cable release in one hand and a pitcher of grape juice in the other, I fired off a couple of hundred frames in a darkened studio to get one that really captured the look I wanted. I've included a few of my second choices on the left.

Have questions, comments? Let me know what you think.

Technical Data

The Pour was captured using a Nikon D200 with a 105mm ƒ/4 Micro-Nikkor manual focus lens. Light was provided by four Nikon SB-25/26 strobes at minimal power inside a softbox. Exposure was effectively 1/23,000 of a second at ƒ/11.

Other Images of the Week