Oct 20

It’s amazing what you can learn in a day. The first shot of the beer can I posted yesterday was a little flat – the lighting was dull. It didn’t give the can any life.

So I worked on the lighting, re-thought my approach, and went with a setup that created dramatic light on the can. Nice and bright down the middle, fading off nicely to near black along both edges.

I also addressed the sweat on the can – the first shot was sweaty, but the beads were too small. In this shot, I used a different technique and allowed the sweat to bead up nicely.

The shot is all accomplished in-camera – there is no Photoshop retouching done to this can. All that was done in Photoshop was to remove the support.

I think this version is starting to look a lot more appealing. It needs more time to tweak the placement of the sweat beads, but that’ll have to wait for another day.

richards  0282 Cold metal beer can   Rickards Red Part II

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Oct 17

I started to work on a metal can of cold beer earlier today to see what I could do. It’s not a subject I had photographed in the past, but was asked recently to show some of my beer shots.

Here is the result of a few hours of playing earlier today – everything but the table reflection was done in camera. No compositing.

The can still needs work – silver above and below the main red label – but the general lighting is starting to work. Next step is to tweak it and then add some interest. Maybe a lump of ice built up in front of the can? A pour into a glass behind the can? Not sure yet.

I’ll keep working with it to see what comes up.richards  0063 Cold metal beer can   Rickards Red

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