Jani Virta, founder and barkeep of Cocktail Company and a Torres Spirits Brand Ambassador.
Jani and I go a way back, being that we're both from Oulu and he was in my class in school when we were kids. These days Jani runs a really nice cocktail bar in downtown Oulu, Cocktail Company, which is a great spot to sip on something nice, like a Rusty Nail or an Old Fashioned.
At any rate, I had been wanting to photograph Jani for some time now. I wanted to shoot Jani in an editorial style and we talked about ideas. He is also a Torres Spirits Brand Ambassador, holding workshops for bartenders and generally evangelizing about great brandy. Not that it needs any special testimony: this is one tasty brandy.
So! Jani offered to bring the props from CC which included the barkeep's attire, hat and this cool apron they wear. He also brought a bottle of Jaime I and a glass to go with it. On top of that he said he'd bring a barrel.
"Is it heavy?", I asked.
"Not at all."
That thing was fucking heavy.
He routinely lugs this barrel around as a prop for a pop-up bar or a private function or whatever, so he had experience with hauling it. He even had a tiny cart for it so we could push it around on wheels.
My studio was up two flights of stairs, though, and no elevator. So we carried that beast up the stairs, cussing out everything while we did it--me more than him.
The barrel has a great rustic feel to it which is complemented by the staff outfit. I thought that Heidi's hand-painted canvas would make a great background for this and we'd approach this something like a liquor ad. We decided we'd work on one image (I had scheduled two hours for every sitter) with the barrel and then I would shoot some portraits of Jani. envisioning something that would work as a pair of images: an opener and a portrait, if this were for a magazine.
Having gotten the barrel in the room, lighting the image was pretty straightforward. I figured something classic would work best for a painterly feel, keeping in with the rustic and the earthy and things like that. Jani and the top of the barrel is lit with one speedlight inside a 28" Westcott Apollo to camera left. Off to camera right there is a silver reflector bouncing a little light back to Jani.
The barrel needed some light as well, but I didn't want to make it too prominent (I was still mad at it for tearing up my back.) I put another speedlight on a Manfrotto Nano stand on the floor in front of it and stuck a shoot-through umbrella on it. You can see the catchlight in Jani's eyes as well. I didn't dial in too much power so that 1) I wouldn't underlight Jani horror-movie style and 2) the barrel wouldn't start taking away from what was happening on top of it. Background is lit with the Apollo as well.
Then there was the bottle. Photographing glass is very technical. Photographing liquid is as well. Photographing liquid in a glass bottle that curves like a Gaudí chimney is something you could spend hours on, and I wasn't going to do that.
The problem was that by only Jani's key light, the brandy remained a really dark shade of reddish-brown, nearly black in that exposure. The bottle had no sparkle other than the reflection from the Apollo. Hmm!
But I did have a flashlight. And white gaffer's tape. And Jani would have one hand available, since he was holding the glass in his right hand.
What we ended up doing was sticking a strip of white gaff on to the side of the barrel, just behind the bottle. Jani's left hand (camera-right) is holding my flashlight and shining it on the strip of tape, which reflects and effectively backlights the liquid. It's not perfect by any means but it does bring that little streak of red on the bottle and gives it some life. (Shooting glass, I tell you, what a pain. The glass he's holding is also distorting his arm, being a round bulgy transparent object that bends light--the glass, that is.)
But! That little bit of flashlight hi-jinks meant that this turned into a two-second exposure. Small low-powered flashlight needed that time to register for the exposure. The flashlight is only lighting the bottle, so after the flash went off to light Jani, he was completely in the dark as far as the camera was concerned. So no motion-blur.
Here's an alternative shot, where the flashlight is most likely resting on the barrel behind his arm:
Having spent the majority of our time on the barrel shot, I moved on to the portraits, still using the same background. Lighting is the Apollo, this time from camera direction.
And another one, Apollo to camera left and a reflector camera right:
After that all there was left to do was to pick up that bastard of a barrel and take it back!