I posted the above image as one of my POTD (Photo of the Day) images recently.  It was created at a recent “Table Top Photography” evening at the studio.  While the technique is probably fairly obvious I thought it worth just making a few comments about the image and how it was created.

The obvious part of the image is that the surface is sloping and the camera tilted to the corresponding angle.  The glasses were attached to the surface using some clear double sided sticky tape.  Which shouldn’t show in the image, but just to be on the safe side we placed the tape at the back of each glass.

The liquid in each glass was coloured using food colouring.  At first we put too much colour in the red and yellow glasses and had to adjust the concentration to ensure that it was translucent.  The trick to getting the water levels right involved using a spirit level held behind the glasses to ensure that the liquid in each glass was the same height as it’s neighbour.  Because of the slope your brain plays tricks with you when trying to do this by eye.  A large syringe was used to extract any excess liquid from each glass until the levels were correct.

As with any liquid or translucent object the lighting the set-up involved putting light primarily on to the background so that it could shine through the liquid.  We used to boards to prevent the light on the background hitting the glasses directly.  We also added a soft box high front left to add a little bit of fill to the scene.

The whole set-up can be seen in the image below.