Guest post
Anyone who has tried to photograph a perfume bottle knows glass is a pain. Lab vials take that pain and shrink it to about four centimetres tall, then add a label full of tiny numbers that the client will read with a magnifying glass, and contents that really shouldn't be sitting under hot lights while you mess about with a reflector. Lovely!
It's a niche job, but it turns up more often than you'd think (small labs, university departments, suppliers who want honest product pages), and it's a good test of whether your technique actually holds up when there's nowhere to hide.
So, first things first: find out what the stuff in the vial can put up with. A lot of research compounds are shipped freeze-dried and don't like warmth, damp or bright light, which is why the people who handle them keep them cold, dark and sealed. Bluum Peptides has a decent plain-English page on how light and temperature affect peptide stability if you want the reasons behind that. What it means for us, behind the camera, is pretty basic. Work quickly, keep things cool and think of every minute the vial spends out of the fridge as money you're spending.
Then there's the paperwork. Lab products usually come with a certificate of analysis, and your picture will often end up sitting right next to it, so the batch number, lot code and dates on the label have to be readable and have to match. Great Northern Peptides explains what each line of a certificate of analysis means in a way that makes sense even if you've never seen one before. Ten minutes with that, and you'll get why a gorgeous shot with the lot number blown out by a highlight goes straight in the bin.
Build the set with a dummy, not the real thing
Normal studio habit goes something like: set up, faff for an hour, bring the hero product in at the end. Don't do that here. Get hold of an empty vial the same size and glass colour, stick on a copy of the label printed on similar paper, and do all your faffing with that. Reflections, focus, exposure, the lot. Only when it all looks right do you swap the real one in, take the shots and get it back in the fridge.
Done like that, the real vial might be out for two or three minutes instead of forty. Agree a time limit with the client up front, and if they want a log of when things came out of storage and went back in, keep one. It takes seconds and it makes you look like you know what you're doing.
Stuff worth having sorted before the real vials turn up:
a stand-in vial matched for size, glass colour and cap
a copy of the label (or a photo of it) so you know exactly which bits of text need to be sharp
cool-running light, meaning LED panels or flash, definitely not tungsten
a cool box or insulated bag on set so nothing sits on the table between takes
lint-free gloves, because fingerprints on glass are a nightmare to retouch.
Lighting glass without cooking it
Tungsten is out, full stop. It pumps out heat, and a little glass vial a foot away from a hot lamp warms up faster than you'd expect. LED panels run a lot cooler. Flash is cooler again since the light's only there for a tiny fraction of a second, and as a bonus it freezes any wobble on a long macro set-up, so if you've got flash, use it.
Glass shows up through its edges. Stick a clear vial in front of a white background, light it from the front, and it pretty much vanishes. The old trick is to light the background instead of the vial: a softbox or a lit sheet of diffusion behind the subject, so the glass picks up dark outlines where it curves away from you. That's bright-field. Dark-field is the reverse: black behind the vial and a strip light just out of shot on each side, so the edges glow white. Both are fine. Bright-field is usually better for catalogue and record shots; dark-field looks moodier but has a habit of swallowing labels.
Labels are where it gets awkward, because the label wants light from the front and the glass wants it from behind. Usually the answer is a small, soft fill from the front, angled so its reflection lands just off the label. Tape a strip of black card above the lens, too. Otherwise, you'll get a dark blob in the middle of the curve, which is, annoyingly, the camera looking at itself. Take a test frame, zoom to 100 per cent, look at the label. Hotspot across the text? Nudge the fill a couple of centimetres and go again.
Sharp labels, honest colour
You'll be at or near macro distances with most vials, and depth of field gets silly thin. At f/2.8 on a 100mm macro up close you've got a few millimetres in focus, and the label wraps round a cylinder so the edges fall away from you anyway. f/8 to f/11 is usually enough to keep a whole label legible. Go much past f/16 and diffraction starts softening the very small print you're trying to show off, which rather defeats the point.
If the whole vial needs to be sharp, top to bottom, focus stack it. Shoot a run of frames at slightly different focus points and merge them later. There's a nice side effect for this kind of work as well: on a focusing rail, a stack takes a few seconds, whereas trying to nail one perfect frame at f/22 can eat up far more time than the vial should be spending out of the cold.
Colour matters more than usual, too. A clear solution can't go yellow because your white balance is warm, and white powder needs to look white. Pop a grey card or a colour checker in the first frame of every set-up, same light, and correct to it afterwards. And please don't "improve" the colour of whatever's in the vial. For documentation, a nice warm cast is just a wrong cast.
Before you call it done, check the label at 100 per cent and ask yourself whether every character of the batch number is readable, whether it matches the paperwork, whether the dates are sharp and glare-free, and whether your retouching has gone anywhere near the label (it shouldn't have).
Backgrounds, props and resisting the urge to style
These subjects look right when the set looks like a lab and not a day spa. Plain white or mid-grey acrylic, or brushed steel if you can control the reflections. A clean bench, a rack, maybe a pair of nitrile gloves poking in at the edge. Leave the eucalyptus and the marble offcuts at home.
Be careful with props that suggest something the product isn't. If it's sold for lab research, shoot it as a lab item. Syringes, pills, gym kit or lifestyle settings change what the picture says, and a careful client will be glad you left them out. People don't talk about this side of the job much, but a photo makes claims of its own, and in documentation work you only want it to say "this is what the thing looks like".
Working cold
Condensation is the obvious one. Bring a vial straight out of a fridge into a warm studio and within seconds you can get a fine mist on the glass, which kills the clarity and fuzzes the label text. You've basically got three choices. Keep the studio cool (even a few degrees helps). Let the sealed vial sit in its packaging for a bit so the outside warms slightly, but check with the client first because some won't want any warming at all. Or just accept a bit of mist, shoot fast and wipe the glass with a lint-free cloth right before each frame, which is usually the simplest. Keep the cloth on set. And don't breathe on the glass to clean it, tempting as it is.
What happens between shots matters just as much. The vial goes back in the cool box as soon as you're done with it, not left on the bench while you scroll through files on the laptop. Do your reviewing on the stand-in shots wherever you can.
Shooting a sequence for the records
Clients who need lab samples photographed hardly ever want a single hero image. They want a consistent set they can compare over time or between batches, so it's all about repeatability. Mark the camera, light and subject positions on the set with tape. Write down focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO and flash power for each set-up. Shoot the same angles in the same order every time (front label, back label, cap, base, one overall), get a small ruler and the grey card into at least one frame per sequence, and name the files by batch number and angle as you go rather than later.
Shooting tethered? Rename on the way in. A folder of IMG_4371 to IMG_4420 is no use at all to a lab manager who needs the back label of one particular batch six months down the line.
Editing: take away, don't add
Post-production on this sort of job is mostly about holding back. White balance to the grey card, exposure so the label reads and the glass edges are clean. Dust on the background can go if the client's happy with that, but leave anything on the subject itself alone unless they say otherwise, because a speck inside a vial might be exactly what their quality team is looking for.
Keep sharpening light and global. Heavy local sharpening on label text gives you halos that look odd when the image gets printed or zoomed. Export at whatever resolution they ask for and archive an untouched raw alongside the edit. If the image might ever be used as a record, the original is the evidence and your edit is just a way of presenting it.
Talk to the client first
A quick chat before the shoot saves a lot of grief. How long can things be out of storage? Can they be unboxed or do they stay sealed? Any rules on what the pictures can and can't show? Which text has to be legible in every frame? Where will the images actually be used, given that a website product page and an internal quality record want quite different crops and backgrounds?
Quite often the client won't have thought about half of this. Bringing it up early makes you look like a specialist rather than someone who happens to own a macro lens, and it saves a reshoot when the lot number turns out to be unreadable.
Kit
Nothing exotic. A full-frame or APS-C body, a 90mm or 100mm macro, a couple of small flash heads or LED panels, a sheet of diffusion, some black and white card and a solid tripod will cover most jobs. A focusing rail helps if you're stacking. The oddest thing on the list is a cool box from a camping shop, and it's probably the most important.
Honestly, most of this is patience and prep. Light the dummy, look after the real thing, check the label at 100 per cent and keep the colours honest. Get that right and you'll find you're better at photographing anything small and shiny, watches and rings and whisky miniatures included.
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