Commercial Applications

By: Rahim Gilani



This image is one of the first bottle images I did in my career, and I will always remember this shoot as it took almost 5 hours to get it right, but in the end, it turned out well.


The main thing I learned from this shoot is how to get separation at the bottom of the grapes and the wine bottle, so they are not lost in the background.

To achieve this photograph, I used two strip lights parallel to the bottle and a reflector along the bottom of the image, which I then photoshopped to match the colour of the glass.





This image is one of my favourites that I have created. This photograph was for an assignment where the task is to feature glassware. This is a challenging assignment because it is hard to get the perfect lighting with anything made of glass; you really have to pay attention to reflections and specular highlights.

One of the main things my professor (Richard Beland) taught me is to “do it in-camera.” This statement stuck with me. Now 80% of my images are made in-camera with minimal photoshop afterwards.

For this image, I used two strip lights and one background light. All the lights were covered with vellum paper, and the backlight had a blue gel. It was tough to get detail in the cheese, so I had to add a small light right above the camera, pointing at the cheese to bring some detail back into the product.

When I was planning to do this shoot, I was thinking of what elements I should use, and I ended up referring back to a colour wheel where I found the opposite of blue is orange. I then went to the grocery store and picked up all the vegetables and fruits that looked orange. The idea of using cheese came from watching movies featuring people from Italy eating cheese while drinking wine, and the idea to use bread came from the movie “The Irishman.”





This photograph was a passion project and also for my portfolio. It was taken during the second year of my photography course.

The idea of doing an air freshener product photograph came from my workplace, Giant Tiger.
I was working one day, and out of nowhere, I asked my Supervisor to give me a challenging
product that she wanted me to photograph which ended up being the air freshener and the Stewarts soda bottle.

After getting the product, the main challenge for me was what props I should use. I carefully looked at the product this time and saw apples and cinnamon, it was already pictured on the product to show the fragrance. The backdrop was created by hanging blinds behind the product. My overall idea was to show the product near the window in the morning.

I took many photos with a full apple but didn’t look appealing. After a few shots, I took the knife and cut the apple, which adds more texture to the image.

To achieve the desired lighting, I used four strip box lights and two flags. All of the strip lights were covered with velum paper to get the soft edges on the product itself.





This was the other product given to me by my supervisor. To achieve this lighting, I used two strip lights and some paper that I bought at Dollarama. My goal was to make this a very colourful photograph.

I wanted to try something different with this image and knew it would be tough to execute. The original plan was to make it look artistic, so in photoshop, I selected the bottle from one image, lemon from another and glass from the third. I then drew the spikes which are visible on the bottle and added the border with more bright colours to make it pop.

This is the only image featured in my portfolio that is a product digital-manipulation. It was a fun shoot, and I'm happy with how it turned out.