Sunday Italian Wine Photography Mini Project

What do you do when you get your online wine order delivered just 2 hours after placing the order…. on a Sunday?! Thanks to the great people at Vine.lu , who are ensuring their Luxembourgish customers are constantly failing their AA’s goals, I had enough time before the 5pm to take some shots of these wonderful Italian wines.

Roero DOCG 2015 Italian Wine

My first ‘victim’ was the Italian Roero DOCG 2015. I was looking for a simple setup with one light-source. I placed the softbox on the left-hand side and a white-board on the right. If you’re interested in buying it (I haven’t opened it yet so I can’t give you my review), have a look at Vine.lu ’s website here.

My wife suggested the styling for the second shot - simple yet elegant and very spring-like! I think it goes very well, color-wise, with the pink wrap around the bottle’s neck and the ring. According to Vine.lu, this Etna Rosato D.O.P. Dedicato 2018 is produced based on the ancient methods and it’s unfiltered. You can check it out on this website here.

Etna Rosato D.O.P. Dedicato 2018

Vegan Chocolate Hazelnut Muffins - food photography

A rainy day is not only good to bake muffins but it’s also an opportunity to take food photography. As we are double locked in (because it rains outside and because of COVID-19), my wife decided to try a new recipe of vegan chocolate hazelnut muffins. I took this opportunity to take a picture of them.

The setup

My trusted assistant

Of course I had my trusted assistant with me (see above) who was supervising all the work.

Beer Product Photography for Luxembourgish Craft Beer Importer

Craft beer, or microbrewery, is becoming more and more popular in every part of the world. I was introduced to the craft beer community back in the US a couple of years ago. Now, I’ve been discovering this world in Luxembourg, where I met local brewers at the Kirchbéier Craft Beer Festival. I met there Joao, the owner of JMCraftBeerTrade. JMCraftBeerTrade  imports Portuguese microbreweries’ beer to Portugal. After talking with Joao for few minutes, we came up with a small photo collaboration project. I wanted to take pictures of two beers for the photo assignment. 

Cerveja Maldita’s Robust Porter

The first one was the Cerveja Maldita’s Robust Porter. I was intrigued by its dark and mysterious label and the silver highlights that give the label its sophistication. I wanted to reflect it in the pictures.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

The second microbrewery was Cerveja Oitava Colina. They place very artistic graphics on the labels, representing unique personalities, that seem to be reflected in the type of beer they represent. 

Photographing Wine Bottle With Only One Light Source

I think that any bottle (glass) product photograph is both quite challenging and also very rewarding. The main challenge comes from being able to constrain the reflections, make them soft and elegant and and to use them to your profit in order to create an interesting image. This type of product photography can get complicated pretty fast, especially when you’re dealing with many weird reflections and light sources. Therefore, sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. I have recently photographed a Rusack Wine Bottle and I started off with my typical setup and two light sources. My vision of the final image was a clean, classic and elegant image of the bottle but I also wanted to make it challenging for myself. The challenge? To have the already black bottle on black background.

Speed light behind white plexiglass

Two black foam board on each side

I eliminated one of the lights after several trials and errors (mostly errors of trying to use the lights on both sides of the bottle). I placed the remaining speedlight behind the bottle and put a white plexiglass between the light source and the bottle. Next, I placed two black foam core boards on each side of the bottle in order to have black background. I left a very tiny space (not visible in the final picture) just behind the bottle for the light to go through. Last but not least, I used two white foam boards on each side of the bottle in order (see pic below) to get nice highlights on both sides. Once I photographed the bottle, it was time for the wine glass. I simply placed the glass in the background, a bit to the right from where the bottle was standing and I repositioned the white foam boards to have the highlights uniform on both sides of the glass. I ended up having two images which I brought to Photoshop for editing.

Greeting Cards Photography for Willow Berry Studio

I found in my mailbox a very interesting photography project proposal a couple of months ago. Angela, the owner of Willow Berry Studio (http://willowberrystudio.com/), contacted me asking if I wouldn’t be interested in providing her studio with a few styled images of their new line of greeting cards. I was genuinely interested in producing the images for Angela for several reasons: I had never shot greeting cards before and I’m always happy to shoot something new; Willow Berry Studio already had a pretty good idea what they needed and it’s always very helpful when a client has specific requirements; and Angela is a designer and a creative person and I love working with other creatives! We exchanged a few emails, had a couple phone conversations and a meeting to discuss the details. Since Angela had a pretty good idea on what she wanted to have, I did my best to keep her posted on the progress and ask for her opinion and image approvals throughout the project. Here are some of the images I produced for Willow Berry Studio.

Willow Berry Studio is a vintage remix textile and surface pattern design company based in Tennessee, USA. You can find more info here: http://willowberrystudio.com/

Product Beer Photography - SweetWater 420 Pale Ale

October is just around the corner and everyone knows what happens in October, right?…. Oktoberfest!  It’s perfect time for beer photography and I’ve decided to do a couple of beer-related photography projects in the coming weeks. I’ve chosen SweetWater Brewing Company from Atlanta, Georgia for the first project for no particular reason to be honest. One of the ingredients, or rather grains, in their 420 Extra Pale Ale is 2-row (my friends at Bernoulli Brew Werks in Memphis told me that it’s called ‘brewer’s malt’ among the beer specialists).

Due to my current photography commitments, I only have weekends for personal projects so I wanted to developed a unique idea for the shoot but also relatively easy to photography. It took my a couple of trips to buy the right amount of grain for the shoot (I didn’t buy enough the first time). The basic idea was to show that the bottle emerges from grain but that wasn’t enough. I needed at least a couple of props. A bottle opener was a ‘natural’ choice and I wanted the second prop related to the grain. Like most of my ideas, the idea for a grain scoop appeared in my head while doing something completely unrelated to the project. We bought a small teal-leaf scoop in San Francisco a couple of months ago. Its color and size fit perfectly for the shoot. 

Did I mention I wanted to keep the shoot simple? Oh yeah, I did! I used only 1 light in a softbox. The reflection on the bottle wasn’t soft enough so I placed an additional diffusion panel between the set and the light source. I just used a piece of a white foam board to the right to reflect the light back from the other size.

Homemade Yeast Cake with Raspberries

My wife loves to cook and especially to experiment in the kitchen. We decided to try a little project together - she would cook (or bake) something, I would help her a little and then photograph her ‘food art’. I don’t have to explain it was a lot of fun for both of us, but it was also a bit stressful for her because she decided to bake a cake she never had baked before - a yeast cake. The main challenge was to find natural and ‘live’ yeast, which was extremely hard here in the US (in Europe, ‘live’ yeast is common). We only found powdered yeast, which made her nervous and suspicious whether the cake will grow at all. As you can see from the photographs, it grew pretty well :)

Homemade Yeast Cake

Homemade Yeast Cake

Homemade Yeast Cake