Etched Glass Lighting - Redwoodtwig

Etched Glass Lighting

Some experiments in lighting etched glass. This particular wine glass, a cheapo from Kohls, has a very simple etched pattern that looks ok until you look close, or feel it with your fingers. Research online indicated that bottom lighting was the key, but I found there has to be back lighting, and if possible, interior lighting.

Through the view finder, after polishing the glass, it looked fine. But some of the lighting situations brought out a huge number of internal flaws in the glass itself. At first I thought these were dust specks, but I double checked the cleaning it there was no dust on the glass. Well, I did notice one dust spot later in the shooting, probably because there was some dust in the room. Dust shows up as a dark spot, not a light spot.

Any light source in front of the glass will reflect whatever is in front of it, in this case the photographer and wall behind.
Set up for bottom lighting. Very easy to have too much light coming up, blowing out the highlights in the base and head of the stem.
Putting some lights breifly inside the glass did a great job of bringing out the etching. Unfortunately, the time exposure (10 seconds) also brought out imperfections in the glass.
Worked this one later with Lightroom curves and such

Still Life: etched wine glass
EtchedWineGlass_058_06667
Adding an overhead light brought out the etching nicely, but also brought out the imperfections in the glass as well as producing a reflection.
Applying a light to the backdrop in addition to a bit of light from the top got rid of most of the imperfections in the glass, though they become obvious in full view. (click on the image and select X3 on the top panel. This will give about 50% of full view.
Lighting an etched glass
A while back I'd bought a cheap wine glass with some nice etching on it. I cleaned and polished and had what I thought was a very clean glass and proceeded to try to capture the etched lines on it. When I used an overhead light, I discovered the reason why it was cheap: full of interior imperfections that my eye hadn't seen. Actually, I think most of the imperfections were microscopic pieces of lint from the towel I used for the final drying/polishing. I couldn't see them with my eye though.

Here we gave it a touch of front lighting from up high. Now only a few imperfections show, but there are also some hot spots.
Colored lights moved between the backlit backdrop and the glass bring out the etching quite well, and seem to work best on eliminating the glass imperfections. Also reduces the blown out areas at the head of the stem, though not the base.
This slide or negative viewing box was built by me when I was in Germany, so the electrical needs to be changed. For bottom lighting a glass, I wanted a hole just a little smaller than the base.

Inside the box is one of those new battery powered LED lights for sticking in a closet found at most hardware stores. The clamp is just there to support the lid horizontally. The box was originally designed to be used with a slanted top.