Photographing cobalt bottles

[mrbottles]

need help. I'm trying to do a bottle gallery of all Wisconsin pre Hutchinson Wisconsin's soda bottles at my web site. I have a backlight and am getting some good pictures. it seams like my pictures of cobalt bottles just don't look true to the color of the bottles.

I have a bunch of them loaded at the page http://www.mrbottles.com/galleryBlobSodas.asp I am already redoing photo's of dozens of bottles. I want this to be my last redo.

Thanks,

Steven

 

[mrbottles]

That last one is a deep dark cobalt blue and this one is a deep saphire blue. I don't know what i'm doing wrong but the color just isn't right.

 

[capsoda]

Hey Steven, Compaired to some I've done and some I've seen your are pretty darn good. Don't know how you could do any better. Maybe slightly less back light or a slightly grayer back drop?



Hope you had a great Christmas.

 

[mrbottles]

Hi Warren,

Christmas was great hope yours was too.

The problem looking at these pictures for me is that they don't look as awesome as the true bottle does. The cobalt early soda and mineral waters are some of the very best bottles Wisconsin has. I want to show them as well as I can. I have the backlight and that lights them up pretty good. Then I use the flash so the bottle doesn't look like a ghost image. It looks like I am getting a reflection of the inside back wall of the bottle or some thing.

A good friend and fellow collector told me the images in my personal gallery didn't look right. I was so disappointed after spending hours taking those photos that I may be imagining things but I want to get this done this time and move on. He was right too. If you look at the ones im my gallery under host collector you can see the ones that I tried to use the sun as a back light for and now the ones thati have redone. The originals look like crap. Most of the pictures on the site came from this same camera. It's just these individual cobalt bottles that are giving me trouble.

That top hat Hopkins pontil mineral water looks purple or some thing in that picture. It's actually a beautiful deep blue.

I was just hoping some one would see those pictures and know what I need to do to make it perfect.

Thanks Warren,

Steven

 

[Flaschenjager]

Hi mrbottles - Steven,
First of all, for those trying the link in your post, leave off the period at the end of the sentence and it works fine. (You can edit it - included in your thread).

Your photos look great and better than most that post here. For true color, I use all natural lighting for those better pictures. Meaning a good sunny day, but not direct sunlight. You don't have to go outside, just near some large windows for those winter photos. [] If you're still not happy w/ them adjust slightly and use some brightness and contrast in your editing program. You probably already use or do this, but may help some readers.

I've just spent a great deal of time at your site and must say that I enjoyed the many pages. I'd love to add your site to my links page w/ your permission. My sites are scheduled to be updated on the first and will have many changes. A much needed update since my collecting interests change annually.

 

[mrbottles]

Hi Meech,

Yes please add the link. We are trying to make the site spectacular. I'm lucky to have the ongoing help of two hard core collectors and input form many more. Content is huge. It's an effort to keep good content coming. You can see me begging for it all over the site. I have even made a story for the site a part of trades to get content out of motivated people. These bottle galleries are very cool. They will eventually be on of the best resources on bottles any where even though they are limited to Wisconsin.

I haven't played with editing the color because I just feel that would be a deception of sorts. The photo's in sunlight haven't gone so well although I have got some decent images that way in the past. You can see under host collector. I was so anxious to pound out that gallery including the descriptions in less than a day that I didn't stop to look at the quality of my images. The new ones are much better except I don't like the cobalt images. The thing that stinks is that almost all of the Wisconsin cobalt bottles are very rare or extremely rare. Those galleries are the only place a lot of people are going to get to see them.

Thanks,

Steven

I'll be checking your site out tonight. I have to get back to work!

 

[mrbottles]

Hey Meech,

I already looked at your website last week. I found this site one night looking at bottle sites on the internet. I don't know if I found your site from here or on my own. It's pretty cool. I filled out your request for a link there when i found it. I had noticed another bottle web site from Wisconsin had a link there. It's the We Dig Wisconsin site. That's a fun one during the digging season. The guys that built it put up their days events after they go digging. Every weekend means more information


If you have any ideas that would make the mrbottles site better please let me know.

Thanks,

Steven

 

[tombstone]

Color correcting a photo to better reflect a true color wouldn't be deception. If you turned the bottle this color it would be deception []

 

[mrbottles]

Ha Tombstone,

Your color is way worse than mine. I guess that's a good example of the glass half full thing.

I figured out that because I was taking the picture so close it was distorting them. The blob looks like you are looking up at it and the base looks like you are looking down at it. I couldn't see it at first but the more i played with distance trying to figure out the lighting I finally saw it. While the color isn't perfect it's more true from farther away zooming in than from up close zoomed out. Now I just have to retake and reload all the ones I did last night that were redoes from a month ago.

Thanks for the sweet purple Wolf!

Steven

 

[capsoda]

Hey Steven, Quit playing with that camera an check you email. [sm=lol.gif]I found your stopper.[]