Glenfiddich Clean Serves Drinks Photography
Cocktail using Glenfiddich 15yo whisky
I loved doing this one. I always have a bottle of scotch ready in my drinks cupboard so it was a pleasure to shoot for such a big name in the industry.
I got a call from my pal Bryn Williams who was putting together this job for Glenfiddich. The shoot was to capture both video and stills content. He’s a DoP so he was taking care of the video side, while I would do the stills.
The brief part 1
This job was about all the cocktails you can make with Glenfiddich products. They were showcasing about thirty different drinks, so quite an extensive menu. I was to get a clean white background photograph of each of the drinks made, like a product shot of each cocktail. These could then be used in a drinks menu or other similar kinds of printed or digital media. These kinds of photos are sometimes called ‘clean serves’.
The brand wanted these to be able to be cut out to have transparent backgrounds so they could be used wherever needed. This meant setting up this part of the shoot basically the same as I would for something like a pack shot or other kind of standard product shoot, so a nice simple concept.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a simple concept doesn’t always mean simple to shoot, but fortunately I know what I’m up to! If you want details, scroll down to the last part of this post.
Here are a few of my favourites:
The brief part 2
Over on the filming side of the studio, Bryn was filming ambassadors from the brand instructing how to make a range of cocktails using Glenfiddich spirits. Part 2 of my job was to get a clean photo of the scene with the drink and the Glenfiddich product used behind it. This was nice and simple as it was pretty much the same set-up that Bryn had already established for the filmed part, just with a bit of tidy-up and an extra light or two. The shot at the top of this post is from this part of the brief, as is the one below:
Cocktail using Glenfiddich Fire & Cane
Behind the scenes shooting part 2 of the brief.
p.s. it’s actually @patchharveyphoto these days!
The technique behind white background drinks photography
The starting point for this set up was an acrylic base for nice smooth reflections. You can use a solid white piece if you want quite solid-looking reflections, but I chose to use a transparent piece, so that the light from behind (and below) would slightly wash out the reflection - it would be there but less apparent than the main subject.
Next, light. For this kind of white background drinks shot the back light is very important, for two reasons. 1, drinks are translucent, so lighting them from behind means you see the colour and texture of the drink beautifully. And 2, it helps create the white background. I’ll cut them out in photoshop anyway, but it means parts of the glass you can see through will be white, or nearly white as well.
As well as back-lighting I also lit from the front, with a big diffused source to camera left. I used bounce cards to bring up the exposure on the right of the glass too. There were scrims and soft boxes everywhere, essentially.
To get the glasses to show their shape when backlit, I used black and grey cards to the sides of the glass so that the glass would have something dark to reflect. If you don’t do that then you won’t see the glass!
This project was shot in Hackney Studios with the following Crew
DoP/Producer: Bryn Williams
Photographer: Patch Harvey
Stylists: Alexander Walker & Mark Thomson
Assistant: Aled Williams
If you are looking for a professional product, food and drinks photographer, get in touch!