For this assignment Clay and I came with some different objectives – both in technical requirements and concept. Clay opted for a very specific vision that was a technical juggernaut, but ultimately a very informative and worthwhile shoot. I’ll defer to his self-critique for the specifics – but it did demonstrate for me a through process in defining a vision and how to compensate to achieve it. What he may not tell you, we only got the color saturation just right 10 minutes before getting kicked out. You can see the results at his blog, the clever man

For my part with glass, I had simple concept to illustrate that beer (namely) microbrews has come of age. Where society has been plastered with ideas of bargain beers from Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and the like. A sub-culture of connoisseurs has emerged spreading into high society and middle -class not unlike the wine industry to bring in big businesses.  To illustrate this perception shift I wanted to focus on the maturity of beer and what goes into making these microbrews, quite literally in fact.

In addition to a broad concept, I wanted to make the most of this assignment with a variety of setups utilizing both dark-field and light-field techniques. The first setup as light-field was indeed as difficult as they claim, eliminating the horizon line then properly bouncing the light to illuminate beer ingredients without blowing out the lines that were pre-set. The final hurdle was refraction of the ingredients in the lower half of the glass, compensating the camera angle and swapping the glass out was best corrective measure I could determine.

For the dark-field I tried a handful of setups – mutli-glasses, glass and bottle, and single bottle. The largest issue for the multi-glass sheets was staggering the glassware to get hit and dividing/bouncing the light to define each edge. However, this would often lead to reflection of another glass or blowing out one edge to define another. We attempted to compensate with multiple lights divided by gobos to minimize blowout to moderate success. I really want to try another crack at this.

I ultimately settled on a single bottle for the reshoot for technical precision in defining the edges and to emphasize the concept and branding of the industry. However in evaluating my selects, I didn’t like how with the curve of the bottle the light edge moved inward and opted for the light-field select with the Bass product glass with properly defined edges and more vibrant content.