Commercial Narrative Cocktail Photography
How I styled and photographed a commercial product photography image of a cocktail with Jeppson’s Malort in a storytelling narrative style.
Moving back to Chicago in late 2022 (after being away for eight years!) I learned how Jeppson’s Malort had grown in popularity, gaining a loyal customer base even with its uniquely acquired taste. Looking to refresh my beverage photography product portfolio I decided to do a test shoot, buying a full bottle of Malort later to be given to my neighbor who loves the stuff, local Chicago artist John Airo, owner of Gallery 1619.
As I look to expand my commercial photography portfolio during test shoots I am learning more about prop styling, food styling, and post production composite retouching. This one image took about two weeks to plan, shop, stylize, shoot, and edit. I am looking to connect with other local creatives, food stylists, prop stylists, talent, and more to collaborate in the future, but in the interim I am really enjoying learning about all of the elements to a final stylized image like this.
My inspiration for this shoot was to have a textured bold monochrome color background to compliment the colors in the liquor bottles label, a red and greenish yellow. In addition, to show a cocktail as the hero with narrative elements, the sliced up grapefruit which Malort has been described to taste like, and a mysterious backstory with a vintage rotary phone with the receiver off its hook. The curtain background is a yard of red pleather material I picked up from a fabric store and the table top is a textured red paper from an art supply store. All of the other elements I either already had or bought locally, except for the phone which I found online.
The final composite image edited in multiple layers to get the desired lighting and depth of field.
The lighting setup for this image consisted of one 400 strobe, bare bulb to the right, which cast the defined shadows, along with a 200 strobe to the left, high pointing down at the cocktail with snoot and honeycomb grid. I also used a silver reflector behind and to the left to fill in the background from the 400 strobe but just slightly so the left corner would drop off into the black.
Composition wise I used Capture One to tether shoot so that I could see the layout live on my larger computer monitor. The hero is the cocktail, then I surrounded it with the bottle, grapefruit, phone, and shot glasses, in order to lead the viewer into the image to analyze each element telling a story of their own imagination.
Before sample raw image to show the difference in the advanced Adobe Photoshop editing and color swapping techniques used for the final image. While editing this image in post I used multiple frames to composite the final images with layers, in order to get sharper details in the depth of field.
