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.
There is probably nothing much more poignantly repulsive to think about on a Monday morning than Colt 45.
I’m sure everyone has/has heard a good story or two involving this beverage of choice, be it a comedy or tragedy i’m sure the story is very memorable. However as you are sitting there in your office chair looking towards the ominous future that lays before you, inside that elegantly designed cubicle which lays below fluorescent lights, the stories and hilarities that follow such a beverage’s consumption seem so distant.
Enjoy, grimace, daydream…
Why I do this? Well why do i destroy peanut butter sandwiches with baseball bats, make silhouettes of lawnmowers , or use a rotting piano in the forest as a location
I have a habit of embracing the chaos and nonsense that runs rabid through my head.
Its like comedian Mitch Hedberg says; “Sometimes in the middle of the night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen’s too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny” The trouble for me is, I am really bad at arguing with myself, and I’m unable to convince myself not to follow through.
And so I find myself sitting in front of a computer writing about Colt 45 on a Monday morning.
I am an advocate for random, for embracing the chaos that lives inside all of our heads, impulsively taking up crazy endeavors. Genuinely interesting images, and approaches to making great photographs don’t often come from a linear process of cause and effect. Instead they come from capturing fleeting moments of unbridled imagination, they are windows to the different concepts and thoughts that you already have. Follow through on them, develop them, embrace their arbitrary strikes of obscure genius.
