Evaluation

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.

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.