I snapped this picture while visiting the School of Hospitality Management at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts yesterday. Aside from the unusual name of the wine, what I noticed about this picture is the beautiful, natural reflections of light in the two bottles on the right. Photographers go to great lengths to make reflections look natural. For example, one trick is to put strips of black gaffers tape in a mullion pattern on the surface of a softbox to create the look of window panes in the reflection of a large artifical light source. Well, like I said, I just snapped this picture and the reflections I got are of real window panes from real windows! This display was in a lovely little room with windows on three sides, overlooking the ocean. Perfect light. Perfect subject. One shot. Done.

This week I made some improvements in our photo studio and thought I would try them out by photographing glass. My goal was to shoot on both dark and light backgrounds since they require completely different and opposite lighting setups. You can see the result of that work in a short article I wrote called Photograhing Glass. The idea for the image below just kind of popped into my head and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. One of the cool things about using studio strobes for lighting is that their flash duration is so short that they freeze almost any kind of action, like water pouring into a hand-blown glass ice bucket!

Last year (2011) Vermont produced 1,140,000 gallons of maple syrup, more than any other state. Below are just a few ounces of this "liquid gold." This is a typical product shot, photographed in our studio on white plexiglass. To learn how maple syrup is made, visit www.vermontmaple.org, the official web site for VT maple.