October is just around the corner and everyone knows what happens in October, right?…. Oktoberfest!  It’s perfect time for beer photography and I’ve decided to do a couple of beer-related photography projects in the coming weeks. I’ve chosen SweetWater Brewing Company from Atlanta, Georgia for the first project for no particular reason to be honest. One of the ingredients, or rather grains, in their 420 Extra Pale Ale is 2-row (my friends at Bernoulli Brew Werks in Memphis told me that it’s called ‘brewer’s malt’ among the beer specialists).

Due to my current photography commitments, I only have weekends for personal projects so I wanted to developed a unique idea for the shoot but also relatively easy to photography. It took my a couple of trips to buy the right amount of grain for the shoot (I didn’t buy enough the first time). The basic idea was to show that the bottle emerges from grain but that wasn’t enough. I needed at least a couple of props. A bottle opener was a ‘natural’ choice and I wanted the second prop related to the grain. Like most of my ideas, the idea for a grain scoop appeared in my head while doing something completely unrelated to the project. We bought a small teal-leaf scoop in San Francisco a couple of months ago. Its color and size fit perfectly for the shoot. 

Did I mention I wanted to keep the shoot simple? Oh yeah, I did! I used only 1 light in a softbox. The reflection on the bottle wasn’t soft enough so I placed an additional diffusion panel between the set and the light source. I just used a piece of a white foam board to the right to reflect the light back from the other size.