While
I origionally found the Billboard project a little hard to start, mainly
getting to grips with the difference between above & below the line
advertising. Once this was understood the project started quite happily, I
chose Dalmore Scotch as my subject.
I chose Dalmore specifically as to me it gives an air smoky, dark, gentlemans clubs style feel, a finer drink. I tried to mimic this in the photoshoot and I got close to what I wanted but it was in no way perfect.
I chose Dalmore specifically as to me it gives an air smoky, dark, gentlemans clubs style feel, a finer drink. I tried to mimic this in the photoshoot and I got close to what I wanted but it was in no way perfect.
Ideally
I would have wanted to use a large peice of fine stained oak with some
skillfully crafted edges and a background of burgandy studded leather. Though
cash flow contraints forced me to just use a soft black background. Though I
got round the lack of background props by adding in more mid/foreground props
such as the crystal glasses and the leather bound flask. Personally I believe
adding the glasses and flask made the image feel far less empty and gave the
gentlemans club feel.
As
for lighting I chose to use a Elinchrom light with a custom super long snoot.
It had the effect I wanted during the test shoot however on the shoot day the
lighting was not as good as the test though still did the trick. In order to
get the bottle and the glass correctly lit I chose to stick very thing sheets
of copper foil behinde them, this gave the light a chance to reflect back into
the bottle illuminating the scotch inside. Also used was a polyboard behinde
the bottle and a reflector on the front right for a little more light.
The
biggest problem I ran into when shooting was that the snoot light was causing
some horrendous glare on the front of the bottle though any time I tried to
move it nothing worked ,so I removed the stopped from the bottle and placed it
infront of the glare. This is turn lit the stopped nicely but left the bottle
untouched.
At
the beginging of the projetc I though the post production would be daunting
especially if the copper backing made its way into the shot, though I had cut
and stuck the copper so precisely this did not happen.
When
I was actually fully able to look at my images properly after the shoot I was
slightly upset to find most shots where slighty darker than I wanted and the
bottle had not been lit well enough. Though in post production I did managed to
bring some of the detail in the bottle back which went along way to solving
this issue.
Given
the chance to do the shoot again I would ensure the lighting was perfect and
everything was exellently lit.
