This photograph of actually 5 perfume bottles shows only one bottle in focus - the four additional bottles are far out of focus and only used to create the background with all it's colors and blurred highlights.
To be able to do this, it was important, that the aperture of the (macro) lens used was (almost) fully opened: The max aperture is f4 and I used it at f5,6. This however required a power pack that allowed me to work at a very low power setting: The picobox, that I used to fill in the shadows and to create some reflections on the glass cork was set to no more than 8 joules. A Scoro 1600 S WiFi was the only choice.
The blurred highlights and the colorful light patterns were achieved by firing a picolite, equipped with medium honey comb grids, through the little bottles. This light shaper was placed very low (actually halfway below the table!) to avoid any core shadow in front of the objects.
When shooting small objects (here it is a gift set of very small perfume bottles of 3 or 4 cm size) it is essential to adjust the size of the light shaper to the size of the object. The small lamp system of picolite is certainly the best choice.
The picture is shot with a medium format camera and a focal length of 120 mm.
The exposure time was 1/500 s and the aperture f/ 5,6.
