“Pint of the black stuff, landlord. I thought you wanted to get cleaned up. Bathroom’s back there.”
- Bullet Tooth Tony

Seriously, Guinness is probably one of the most overrated beers on the market right now [I just lost 70% of the readers with this statement]. You can’t hate on them, though, they just have fantastic marketing. But all of that is irrelevant, I just wanted to throw that out there. Now, let’s get down to business, and take a look at this shot.

It was a beautiful Friday morning, and I was stuck at work until the sun went down. Luckily, it was a slow weekend, so my boss proposed that I get some shooting of my own done. Who am I to say, “no” to that? I needed to get some detail or product shots done anyway. “What to shoot…?” I thought to myself as the minutes passed. As I sat there I thought, “Man, I could use a beer.” and like Archimedes in his moment of clarity, a miniature “EUREKA!” rang in my head. I suddenly knew what I wanted to shoot.

I remembered that Guinness always had an interesting sheen on their bottles, and figured it would look fantastic in pictures. So, naturally, that black concoction became my beer of choice for the next couple hours. So, with a six pack of Guinness, a spray bottle, some lights, and a Canon 1D, equipped with a 70-200 2.8L, I got straight to work.

I played around with different compositions, but for the most part, knew how I wanted to light the bottles. Two strobes, to the left and right of the bottle, with massive soft boxes, angled around 45 degrees back so the light only skimmed the sides of the bottles. This provided interesting lighting, and provided specular highlights that weren’t distracting, but instead added to the picture. However, I found that the name and other details on the label didn’t stand out as clearly as one would have hoped. What could be done about this? I tried a snoot, but that was worthless. I tried a reflector, but that was also a lost cause. I tried a hair light, and once again I failed to achieve what I wanted. “What could I do?” I pondered, “Ahh, let’s break out the tripod and see what I can do with that.”

After mounting the camera on the tripod everything became more clear, both visually, and mentally. With the tripod I could lengthen the exposure more to try and bring out some more of the label. Alas, the “G” and the “S” were starting to now get lost. Screw it, I can handle that in post processing.

The bottles looked great, but there was something lacking. What could I do to really try to push this shot? I’ve got it! What if I were to lengthen the exposure time, and zoom in or out during that time? Yes. This was it. This was the extra element, the now not-so-secret ingredient to my photographic experiment.

After messing around with this process for a little bit, I threw the camera into the hands of my assistant saying, “aaannnd, I’m spent. Just kidding, I’m no Austin Powers. I neatly put everything back in its proper place, and thanked my boss for the use of, well, everything. Then it was on to post processing… Which I will keep a secret. Nothing intense was done, but I’m tired of typing, and I’m sure you’re tired of reading. So I’ll leave you with this:

“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.”
- Frank Sinatra

Tags: Fat Tom