I arranged the equipment as shown in the picture. I used two LED lights to ensure that the light strip on the glass and the bottle was as symmetrical as possible. It can be done with a flash too, but it’s much more cumbersome to take a series of test shots compared to seeing the result with continuous light on an LCD screen. For the shoot, I used a glass and a wine bottle because it wouldn’t be possible to photograph with multiple glasses and bottles in the same way as in the sample image.

Next to the glass, there are two pieces of polystyrene foam with their inner surfaces painted black to reduce reflections. Ideally, the room should be painted black, but because of the light reflecting off the white wall, some reflections were still visible and had to be adjusted during post-processing. The glass needs to be as clean as possible because even the smallest speck of dust or damage shows up under this lighting, and although I wiped it before shooting, I still had to do some post-processing.

The movement of the wine in the glass is composed of two images. The base image shows the glass at rest. In the other images, I manually moved the glass by holding it at the base. While moving the glass, I took about 40-60 shots with a remote shutter release, adding a flash to each softbox for additional brightness, allowing me to shoot at the camera’s maximum flash sync speed (1/250 sec). During post-processing, I replaced the bottom of the glass in the manually moved images with the base image to hide my hand. Finally, I arranged the various versions of the bottle and/or wine glass images side by side to my liking.