Small Flash - Back-light Bottles

An interesting way to use your small flash is to use it for back-lighting bottles of your choice. Set-up can take a few minutes but the results are very nice looking.

I used a very small flash with a slave attached to it for the back-lighting of the bottles. The slave will trigger the flash when another flash is fired. The flash that I used for the front lighting of the bottles and to trigger the small flash behind the bottles was a Nikon SB-800.

I did a test shot of the bottles and the proper exposure was f/22 @ 1/250. The flash that I used to trigger the small flash was set to a very low output for the first shot. It was set to 1/128 power, which was just enough to make the small flash fire.

To increase the clarity for the front of the bottles I had to increase the power of the front flash to 1/2 power and bounce it off the white ceiling. That seemed to be the correct amount of light output to make the bottles look very good.

The small flash that I used behind the bottles had one power for its light output and that was full throttle. I could have used another flash with variable light outputs but I chose to use this one because it was so small and could squeeze behind the bottles so easily.

Try this lighting technique out. It is very rewarding to see the nice light you can create using this method.
Let me know how your images turns out.

Until next time.....Stephen H Causey