Photographing jars and dark bottles

Artisan food producers sell things in glass. Olive oil, honey, preserves, vinegar, sauces — and almost all of it goes into containers designed to protect the contents from light, which is the opposite of what a camera needs.

The result is a photograph of a dark shape with a label on it, and no information about what is inside.

Light through, not at

Anything transparent or translucent needs light coming through it from behind. This is the single most important rule for photographing food in glass, and it is not intuitive.

Light from the front bounces off the glass surface, showing you reflections and the label. Light from behind travels through the contents and reveals colour, clarity and viscosity.

Set up with a window, a lamp or a light panel behind the bottle, and photograph from the front, slightly off-axis so the source is not directly in the lens.

Dark glass needs more light than you think

Green and amber glass are deliberately opaque. Getting light through them takes a bright source, and the difference between a black bottle and a glowing green one is often just power.

A window on an overcast day is usually enough for a bottle. Direct sun works, though it produces harder edges. A cheap LED panel at full power works well and gives you control.

If the bottle stays black, the source is not bright enough or is not directly behind the bottle. Move it, do not brighten the photograph.

Honey, oil and viscous things: show the pour

Viscosity is a quality signal that cannot be photographed at rest.

A photograph of honey pouring — the thread, the coil where it lands, the way it folds — communicates thickness and quality more than any static shot of a jar. The same applies to olive oil, syrups and thick sauces.

This needs two people or a stand, a fast shutter and a backlit setup. It is worth doing once per product because it becomes the image that carries everything else.

Preserves need the contents visible

For jams, pickles, ferments and anything with visible pieces, the buyer wants to see the pieces.

Photograph against light so the contents are lit through, and position so the largest visible pieces face the camera. If the jar has settled with everything at the bottom, turn it or use a fresh one — a jar that looks like a layer of liquid over sediment does not sell.

Consider photographing the contents outside the jar too: a spoonful, a small dish, a slice of bread with the jam on it. This is the shot that shows texture, and it usually sells better than the jar.

Labels still have to be readable

All this backlighting is in tension with the label, which is front-lit information printed on the container.

The compromise is a fill light or a white card at the front, weak enough not to kill the backlight but strong enough to lift the label. Or photograph two frames — one lit through for the contents, one lit conventionally for the label — and use both.

For anything with regulatory text, treat the label as its own photograph. Nothing about it should be adjusted, obscured or altered.

Reflections on glass are the other half of the job

Curved glass reflects everything around it, including you.

Photograph in a place with a plain surface opposite the bottle, wear dark clothing, and check the shoulders of the bottle on screen where reflections are worst. A large soft light source reflects as a soft band, which looks intentional; a small hard one reflects as a bright dot, which looks like a mistake.

What restaging keeps

The contents, the glass, the label and the fill level are preserved from your photograph, which is what matters when the product is inside a container and the container is the same for every producer in the category.

What it changes is the surface, the background and the quality of the light in the scene. So the backlighting is still your job — it is the thing that makes the contents visible at all — and the rustic table, the marble slab or the clean white setting is not.