Impressionistic Summer Drinks Bottle Photography

AKA The Tour de France!

Check out these tasty bottles of some classic French spirits:

A bottle of Ricard’s Pastis de Marseille in this impressionistic style. ©Patch Harvey

The Brief

This was a personal project, but there’s always a brief!

The idea was to showcase some bottles of great French spirits in a kind of ‘Tour de France’. It would be a bottle of Ricard Pastis from Marseille on the South Coast, a bottle of Dolin Génépi from the Alps, and a 16 year aged Pacory Calvados from Normandy. Why I didn’t include Armagnac or Cognac? I wish I knew. Maybe your company makes brandy and you can book me to rectify this omission.

The style for photographing these glass bottles would be both impressionistic and iconic, evoking a sense of nostalgia and a summery sunny mood.

To do this I wanted to use the crisp shadow with sparkling caustic reflections that you get when hard sunlight shines through a drink or a glass bottle. To create the impressionistic style I would use that as the main shape of the image, but have some of the legible part of the bottle visible as well.

A bottle of Dolin Génépi in this impressionistic, sunny style. ©Patch Harvey

A bottle of 16 year aged Calvados by Pacory. ©Patch Harvey

Execution

To photograph these glass drinks bottles in a way that gives the crisp shadows and caustics that sunlight creates, I used a single very hard light source.

To project the shadow and caustic towards the camera that meant placing the light behind the bottle. In each shot it is carefully positioned to give the right size and position of the shadow and make sure that some of the label can be seen properly.

To create the effect of the bottle becoming part of the shadow and caustic reflection, there is a scrim with diffusion paper lying on top of the bottle, which is in turn lying on a clear sheet of acrylic, with the light underneath, photographed from above.

BTS view of the set when photographing these glass drinks bottles.

Like what you see? I am a professional still-life photographer (food, drinks, products) based in South London. Click here to see the rest of my portfolio!

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Want to see more creative drinks bottles photography?

Have a look at: Bottoms Up, Down, Left, Right, Where?

Or are you more focussed on the drinks themselves?

Check out: Glenfiddich Clean Serves Drinks Photography

Thanks for reading,