Citroen 16v advert

advertisement for a sixteen-valve sports car by arrangement with Tabasco

Again no retouching made this an extremely hard image to do in one shot. Obviously reading Tabasco is totally unimportant as is the lighting, The only thing important in this advertisment are the streaks and to know it's Tabasco. Using tungsten light allowed me to have long exposure times.

As the shot was for Citroen who’s corperate colour is bright red, I replaced the Tabasco with red paint. I also filled the bottles right to the top  simplifying their look.

The bottles were set up in front of a 10x8 Sinar camera with black velvet as a backdrop.

In front of a second 10x8 Sinar were all the caps, they had metal spikes painted mat black and super glued to each one, the background was also black velvet but this time mounted on a thick sheet of cork and polystyrene.

Now having the bottles in place I traced with a fine felt tip pen the bottles and 1 stopper on the camera back.

This back, I then transferred to the other camera and used the trace of the stopper to find the right size.

By using my trace of the bottles each stopper was spiked into the background in exactly the right position leaving a 15 cm space between the velvet and the stopper, to allow me to add a little light from behind, as you can imagine this was a very time consuming and difficult task.
Now they say ‘when things get tough the tough get going’ well that is what I did I went to lunch, leaving my assistants to do the fiddly bit.

Now to the shooting. I would expose the bottles then move the film to the other camera to expose the tops.

 The movement is achieved by dropping the camera down (or was it up) for the last part of the exposure, just enough not to eat into the bottles this was predefined by marks on the column of the studio camera stand.

Article by:
Phillip McCordall