Behind the scenes of a beer photograph;

Inspiration
- I wanted to make some photographs where gravity is acting strangely; photographs where the viewer’s perception would throw them in loops, questioning what they see, if its real, and how it was done. My first little attempt at this technique was this self portrait.
- The second major piece of inspiration was this Stella Artois Legere ad;

From those two pieces of inspiration I had the idea of beer pouring up against gravity -lighter than air beer- into a glass. Next I had to figure out the best way to do it.
Wanting to most of the shot done in camera I needed to get all the ‘live action’ in one frame, then I could use photoshop to finish and clean up the rest of the shot. I setup a bottle of beer in the studio suspended from the bottom of a large board.
I opened the beer upside down and using a glass in hand catch the beer pouring out. Over several takes with beer pouring into a bucket on the floor (i’m sorry beer lovers I did lose a beer or two to the battle) I got a great action frame.

The shot below shows the studio setup for the live action (Only half the lighting is firing in this frame)

The raw ‘live action’ frame is above to the left, and one of the final bottle’s live frames above right. I photographed the bottle separately, using a lot of transmitted light from behind to complement the very beautifully designed bottles. In photoshop the live action and bottle shots were put together making the final image.