Curiosity Studies I, Fragrance
•
Glass
Curiosity Studies I, Fragrance.
The question was how far a bottle can be reduced before it stops being a bottle. I curated the series around the set design and used a Prada bottle as the subject, running it through different lenses with one light source to see what each build gave back. I wanted the distortion to happen through the lens and through external lens. Bending the bottle optically at the point of capture gives a burrowing, immersive feeling, the sense of being drawn down into the glass instead of looking at it from outside, and finding out what imagery could look like on those terms is the reason the study exists at all. One source and no fill means nothing rescues a bad placement. Glass has no tone of its own, so the only information available is what the light does at the edges, and a hard spot in the wrong position turns the bottle into a flat black shape with no read at all.
I put the spot behind, making a bright pool on the ground so the glass sits as silhouette with the edges carrying the glow. The rest of the set went to black, and the single green gel became the whole palette. That reduction is what turned it into a gel lighting study rather than a bottle shot. Refraction through the thick stopper and the reflection off the polished base do most of the remaining work. I shot motion blur and defocus variants of the same setup to find where the object stops being legible, which is the part I was actually after. Tests like this usually start with a question left over from a commission. This one has not closed yet.
More projects
