In summary: glass is difficult to photograph because it is both highly reflective and transparent. To get impressive looking images of glassware you want to carefully control or limit the reflections while still picking out the detail in the subject. You can do this by lighting the subject from behind with a bright background that is barely bigger than the subject, and surround this background with black. The black regions are refracted by the glass which highlights the edges of the glass.
When the Worth1000 contest "The Letter H" came up the first thing that came to mind was "Home Brew!" one of my other passions. I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try out this technique.
My first attempt on a plain beer glass:
Not very interesting, but with a bit of work could make a nice product shot for a beer glass. That's kind of the idea. Next up, add in a beer bottle.
Definitely more interesting. The dark lines on the RHS of the bottle aren't very even. I wasn't too worried because I didn't intend to include the whole bottle in final shot.
Now with beer in the glass.
Now that's actually getting interesting enough to be considered a "nice" photo.
Tried a different glass.
Yeah, that's better. It looks more interesting, but it needs something else. If I want it to look like it was actually just poored from the bottle it'd look more interesting and more convincing with a bit of beer in the bottle. It also suits my choosen "theme" better.
Although the beer wasn't poured from this bottle it is one that I use for home brew. The bottle that this particular beer came from was a rather less photogenic plastic bottle. This was the batch that I felt like drinking from on this particular day, but also probably the one with the most interesting colour.
My entry achieved second place and my highest score to date, so I call that success!
