Tag Archives: Beer

Heineken Splash

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My inspiration for this weekend was to photograph beer splashing out of a bottle.  Spilling beer however is considered sacrilege by many men, so the precious liquid first had to be consumed and then replaced with water and a few drops of green food dye.

The setup was fairly simple – I first placed a white cardboard as my background, and positioned my speedlight aimed upwards so that the light would bounce off the cardboard and light up the scene. The bottle was then filled up with the green liquid, then poured downward into a collection vessel positioned below. While gravity was doing its job, I triggered my camera (set to continuous shooting mode) and managed to get 4-5 shots before the bottle was completely empty. I then refilled and tried again for a total of at least 5-6 rounds before I got the shot below. The picture was then inverted in Photoshop and voila!

Heineken Bottle2 - 1920c

Shot with my Canon 60D and Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens, at ISO 100, F8.0 at 1/200 sec. Flash was set to manual at 1/8th of its power.

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Light Paintings

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I decided to call my blog “Light Paintings”. For me, these two simple words perfectly describe the art of photography. A photograph is nothing more than a blank canvas painted on with light – the photographer’s tool equivalent of a paint brush or crayons.

In fact there is an entire technique in photography dedicated to light painting using a variety of artificial light sources such as a flashlights, LED lights etc. The technique is simple – position yourself in a dark room, set up your tripod mounted camera for long shutter speeds (e.g. by setting your camera to Bulb Mode), trigger the shutter open, use a light source to paint your picture, then close the shutter. Simple as pie, but the results can be astonishing and the creative possibilities are endless.

Last night, was the first night in over a week with no Euro football matches on TV. Being bored to death and seeing that I could not get over the beer addiction I had developed in the previous days, I decided to set up the following shot. It’s by no means a work of art, but given that it took me just under 5 mins to compose, execute and process, I believe it proves my point.

Taken with my tripod mounted Canon 60D and Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens, in Manual mode, ISO 100, F11 with a 20″ exposure. Only adjustment made in Photoshop was to increase the Blacks slider to darken the background.