Behind The Scenes on a Commercial Drink Photography Photoshoot

[Music] it's Sunday afternoon I'm back in the studio and I'm painting some backgrounds so tomorrow Monday I have a test shoot and we're focusing on drink photography and something I really specialize in but that's the whole point intere Schuster trying new things just you know trying to push the envelope a little bit do stuff that you wouldn't dare deal with the client but for this particular sheet we're building sets so it's all gonna be very minimalist slightly having towards a party sort of vibe I really take you through the process I go through to get the shoot dirt so first off we have a mood board and then we have the shot list so in this particular collaboration I'm work with a food stylist and we would ask that we she builds a really beautiful mood board now you probably wondering why my voice sounds like this up until yesterday I didn't have a voice so it's gonna be a bit husky throughout this video maybe we a new thing now to do this shot as well as getting all the props and drinks that we're going to need all the styling kit we also need the sets and that's what I'm working on now so let me show you what I'm doing [Music] so those who know me outside of YouTube will know that DIY is something I'm new to I when I got this studio I didn't have a clue what I was doing but I since managed to build an office a wall indoors as a butler you know I managed to I had people in but I've got a lot better and this is something that a few years ago would have absolutely baffled me so we're going to these like nice corner pieces so they'll be a floor and two sides I'm going to use C stands and super clamps to hold it all together rather than actually building it and which is why the woods a bit oversized it doesn't need to be this big but I have another yeast fit when it's done so rather than sorting it in half I thought I'd make it make it good with it anyway so Sunday is he painting I've got four gray undercoat now I picked up this tip from the frangie paints model figures if you want a rich dark background go for gray indicate if you want a white background like a bright background before white undercoat now the colored paints are pretty darn expensive there's like 20 pounds of Terp so rather than wasting a layer of colored paints being absorbed into MDF I've gone for the cheap gray paints on first and then pop this on top and I'm pretty pleased with the outcome and this one here needs an extra coat I'll say spilt some bits on it but the solid colors that look pretty darn good and it's a gay with these I've got these little cubes that we've painted there's one to go with each background they all need another coat each but they're pretty good I wasn't quite sure how to build these and then my girlfriend points an ugly just google it and then someone will be selling it to a proper link to these down below because if like me you can't do DIY this is a good time saving little exercise okay so shoot day starts pretty early for me I need to be in there way before the stylist is even thinking about driving now shouts drive down from Manchester which gave me a bit of a head start so we aim for her to arrive at 11:00 I got here at 8:00 and that allowed me to build the sets work out what we're doing set the room up everything in here is on wheels so even most of the kitchens on wheels distance we move it around but everything where we need it for that particular day's tasks and then crack home it's also a great opportunity to get the heating on because it's a warehouse was absolutely freezing it takes about two hours in the morning to get any real temperature in here so first minute whenever walk-in is heating on now join the shoot I'm shooting tethered to capture one I've got a tether tools cable I'm shooting with a 5d s with a hundred mil macro it's on a man throw toe cell understand which is that big black tripod you can see it is the ultimate sort of tripod system it's not the best you can buy but it is the best system you can buy if that makes sense then because the first three shots are the same shot for you know in terms of aesthetic and all the rest of it I've spent a lot of time building the initial lighting setup and then once that was good more happy with it we just rolled through the three shots and it's just a case of composition styling and just fine-tuning the lights to you know take into it consideration any differences in colors glass shape and all that sort of thing if you go into YouTube and look for drink photography drink photography styling and beefed up feel that sort of thing to see all these weird and wonderful ways that people are styling the bottles the glasses the beer whatever it may be there's a lot of tricks going on fake ice cubes dressing the glass spraying the glass you know you get another fake ice all that sort of stuff that's great and it works for certain brands if you're shooting for Budweiser that's definitely the route you're going to go down but it is not the only way or the best way to do things now for this particular shoot we didn't use fake ice cubes we didn't even dress the glass we just clean the glass using like a window cleaner and some like paper got a really nicely cleaned to try and save time and post-production we filled the glass up on set and then we used realized cubes that frozen the eyes keep stays at fan so there's no purified water boiling of the water none of that jazz from the tap to the ice cube tray into the freezer we wanted that imperfection we wanted that realness we wanted the whiteness in the ice cube that's a clear acrylic cube then in terms of condensation we just would try to shoot it before the condensation arrived it didn't fit with the aesthetic that we were going for for this particular shoot no I've done loads of shoes where I've had to use fake ice cubes warm liquids and all that sort of thing it has its place when we shooting monstrous flat ladies we're gonna be there for hours absolutely but this single drink on a stand we've built the shot in sets it didn't say long so realise real drinks and was cracked on with it now the garnishes were obviously carefully curated they were carefully selected the burnt orange which can see him on the shots where it hits the ground that was pure coincidence that we shot it like that it fallen off the glass I happened to fire the shutter at the exact moment he was sort of standing on the ground and perched slightly upward now the garnishes are really important in these images because apart from those and so very much monochromatic image there's not a great deal going on in terms of different colors contrast it's just a slight it could be black and white basically so just finished the first shot and we shot it with a hundred mil lens and then this is a setup so we've got the backgrounds how we look with a couple of C stands and super clamps I've got a scrim overhead and a scrim at the side they got about 2,000 watts coming straight down from there and we flagged that off on the background to stop any sort of excessive light coming through and to come around this way around the back we've then got a medium sized softbox sort of adding a gradient just across the scrim on this side for the catch lights I've got a flag here and then I've cut a hole out of the scrim for my lens to peek through just sort of getting nasty reflections coming in and that's the first setup done okay so I know this is what you guys wanted to hear more about and this is the lighting I get so many questions about lighting setups there are no lighting setups there are no set-piece lighting systems that's something that camera clubs do it's for amateurs it is not the way that you want to be thinking about lighting as soon as you start thinking of setups and systems you've already lost the battle you won't be able to progress so I'm gonna talk you through my mindset as to how I came to this particular lighting and how I decided as I was going along now building into a sin gives you some real difficulties when shooting glassware because you can't get behind on all sides you're limited as to where the lights can go because you've got two opposing walls which stop any light coming through now there's two things I needed to create with my lighter one was the shape of the glass now the shape of the glass was led by having a scrim down the open wall and then having a light coming at a 45 degree angle from the softbox with the softbox touching the scrim so creates a gradation and that gives you that wonderful shaping to the glass now the second lights are needed to create was for the liquid in the glass to light the liquid in the glass I put a really powerful thing as a thirty-two hundred watt head on a pro pack directly above with a really tight grid this isn't the sort of grid you can pick up for ten pounds that's like 180 or 200 pound grid and that Sean Strait Alan's the light and then we did what's called flagging because it was still spilling he even from that I only wanted its hit the light we got some bits of card which were black on one side and we take them to the light into the background just to spot that light from washing down the back of the set now once we've got that we've got a very new D chakra and we've got an illuminated drink and we've got a like a nice shaping to the glass so I brought in a bounce just to add a little bit of atmosphere bit of ambience is more the word I'm looking for here just to lift the general level of the shot and that's it there's no set at the no system this wouldn't necessarily work again it has happened to work with the glass shape we had the sets we had the color range we had and the aesthetic the wheel trying to achieve on this particular shot [Music] [Music] [Music] so just finish this table top shot and I've got a bit of a an old battered tablecloth of the back some fabric on a plank of wood and then to light it gone for a bare bulb from the back but they're really big Spokeo we had a softbox just behind here and that's shooting through the fabric just give it a bit more texture and then the big monstrous softbox can be left with a reflector just to bounce a little bit lighter and that's our finished product so for the second lighting setup of the day we're going something very different I'm gonna try explain again my sort of mindset my mentality behind getting to this position because it's not the sort of thing what you're gonna find this lighting setup in a diagram anywhere so we're thinking summer within the UK it's early afternoon we're getting a bit early on the booze you know we got the linen hanging in the background that's your clothes on the laundry whatever it may be from myself fabrics to keep the Sun out some scrim and we're gonna have a nice soft box coming through the back of that just to give that diffused light in that air we feel to this fabric now as a key light I went for a monstrous two and a half metre softbox is coming in from one side and that was just to flood the image with light and swim did everything to be bright everything to be lit it was a reasonable distance it almost reached the whole way across with a bit of a bounce from a poly board it pretty much filled the shot another thing which sells this image as summer is the certain now a softbox by itself isn't the certain that's a cloudy day so coming in from the back I got a massive sort of spill kill and a bran Cola head whack the power way up and I put it at the angle that the Sun would be at that time of day we backlit the shot with that and that is what sells this image so rather than having a specific sort of lighting setup Lee this is my three light setup for this type of thing it wasn't that more so was trying to recreate what we were looking for us we wanted that simmer we had the light to fill the ambience up with the big soft box we had the backlit linen and then we had the Sun coming through and without the Sun coming through that shot just wouldn't look summery now with the lighting you can go as for as long as you want with these things you just keep adding and adding and I think it can be over lit over complicated see trying to create something which looks as natural as possible for food a lot of the time not always it's absolutely your time to be abstract or subtractive but a lot of the time you want to create something realistic [Music] [Music] okay so this is where I'm gonna lose 75% you whenever I mentioned this in videos or 1f Stoppers everyone goes mad at me I don't edit my work I have a post-production guy he does it for me he's a researcher it's what he does for a job he's brilliant at it now I do calibrate my work and that's something slightly different I'm gonna separate video and how I color grade these images because I don't like outsource my color grading I've tried in the past but no one gets it quite how I want it and by the time I've explained its form I might as well just do it but retouching takes ages and it is not one financially viable for me to do it myself pixel take up too much time and the cost of a researcher is not the same as my profit of shooting time so it's a bit of a no-brainer in that sense [Music] secondly I'm not good at it it is not my skillset is not my forte in the same way that if we have to build a massive set in here I won't be building that I'll be hiring people in soft boxes don't make me a soft boxes I buy them from a shop all these things that you just think you know I'm not gonna tell I'll get someone else to do it there seems to be a sort of thing on the internet where people believe that you should read her own work as utter nonsense very few professionals retouch their own work especially in the commercial world in the advertising world it either goes to the ad agency for their in-house researcher for continuity we sent to a professional research which is built into the budget of the shoot now Robert did a brilliant job in these images and the brief I gave and was warned to tidy everything up because my painting was not as good as I thought it was she was so straighten the images because the boards bowed because I had to leave them at an angle to dry because I didn't have enough time and I had to paint both sides it's got his bode wood going on so he had to straighten that out and make it look all as close to profit as possible although he did tell me he didn't go 100% perfect because it looks weird doesn't some removal of texture from the little cubes I bought because the painting quite covered up and it was quite cheap wood looking for this and work on the texture he cleaned any dust off the glass in this big warehouse here there's dust everywhere so that sort of things really important and I've gotten to a screen recorder so I'm gonna speed this up just can get an idea of how he does it what he does and then I'll show you the final image at the end now I want to do my separate video on this I'll show you from when I get it kind of graded to get a bite from him so you can see the difference at a more in depth video on this but for now hopefully this gives you a good idea for what goes on [Music] so all in all the shields the success I've got all four images in my portfolio my website right now I'll drop a link in the comments somewhere with that and I was really pleased that it went well now there's things that could have gone better I didn't realize quite how challenging lighting the glass shape would be with the corner piece because normally you'd get more space around the back around the sides there's a really nice gradation going on but that was really challenging also we should have tested the glass shapes first because we wanted the continuity and lighting throughout the three cocktail shots you put glass one in your light it looks perfect but glass two in and this is reflections thrown out so everywhere and we should have been more or I should have been more conscious of that but as I say not a drinks photographers say isn't what I specialize in it's just something I do for some clients but I'm not like the go-to drinks going all in all I'd say was a successful shoot now I'm going to break down some of these into separate videos gonna do the retouching I'm gonna do some more advanced lighting videos as well once I'm working a good way to do it so it's not boring as sin if you are enjoying these videos do hit subscribe below small business advice coming out and I'm going to try and keep up with my vlog as well just to show you what I'm getting up to as a professional food photographer see ya next time [Music] you you

Channel: Tin House Studio

Views: 77,320

Keywords: drink photography, food photography, how to photograph drinks, behind the scenes, drink styling, food styling, food stylist, scott choucino, cocktail photography, food photographer, bts, test shoot, how to do food photography, how to style food photography, commercial photographer, studio food photographer, studio food photography, the bite shot, we eat together, tin house studio, macro food photography, drink photographer, food photography tips

Id: I1vbfBLL-5M

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2020