NOTE: After clicking on Show Photo Gallery, please allow time for it to load. Allow the thumbnails at the bottom of your screen to fully generate images, then wait another minute before navigating through the images. If you have time to waste on this site, then you have the time to let the gallery set up before you take the tour. We are talking 92 images here and your crappy wi-fi isn’t exactly military grade.
ALSO: The Photo Gallery feature to my site is only available in THE FAM section, so this post resides here. It actually belongs under the WOW BOB section, but I’m working within the limitations of my site.
This has been quite awhile in the making. Where to begin. In college, I started a modest beer bottle collection. Many of the selections were a result of trying new and specialty beers that were suddenly flooding the market during the micro-brew craze. The collection was intended to showcase some of these specialty beers, although over time many macro brews made their way into the system (all common A-B products like Bud Light were banned from the collection for years). Quite a few beers were the result of the infamous Monday Night Club hosted primarily on the 10th floor of the dorm I lived in. Monday Night Club was a way to unwind after a return to the daily grind of classes, work and reality. Although, in essence, it was simply an excuse to continue the drinking momentum from the weekend. There was also a movie component to Monday Night Club, but frequently it was viewed only as a backdrop to conversion and other tomfoolery. I have never seen Blazing Saddles from start to finish, but I have seen plenty of it during these Monday sessions.
The beer bottle collection survived college, was resurrected in various apartments and even made it to California from Missouri. When I moved out of my apartment in San Diego and into a house, the collection came with me. The intention was to unearth the bottles and create a pseudo-man cave in my garage (before the man cave phenomena became popular). The wife headed out on deployment right after we moved into the house, there was lots of unpacking and lots of fixing up to do (thanks, wife), so the boxes with the beer bottles were low priority. They wound up sitting in the garage serving to prop up other various items. Years went by with the boxes of bottles in my garage (almost 8, actually), but I was frequently reminded of them as I got in and out of my car. The last couple years in the house I was on a mission to de-clutter and simplify. While I didn’t want to lose the history and nostalgia of the collection, I wanted the boxes out of my garage (and the bottles, too). So, the idea of the photo series germinated for several years, until I finally went ahead and photographed them. That was a process.
The Process: Photographing the Bottles
In one word, the process of photographing the bottles was all about compromise. I had grand visions of dramatic lighting and cool images – and my results aren’t terrible, but not nearly what I had hoped for. Each step of the process resulted in challenges that were met with compromise, as previously stated. First, there was the volume issue. Just spending a few minutes on each bottle’s set-up multiplied by 90+ bottles and the time investment was going to be huge. So I had to simplify my process for an easy step-and-repeat photo shoot. This lead to lack of customization and less than perfect results, but it did get the job done efficiently. Second, there was the lighting issue – I used non-professional lighting, the shadows and reflections upon shooting glass were tremendous, and the lack of lighting customization for each different bottle type produced inconsistent results. Third, the bottles were dirty. Hand cleaning 90+ bottles individually and properly was too big a time commitment. So they all got a half-ass dusting. Fourth, my photography knowledge is very limited, and I didn’t invest the time into learning what I could do to better the results. Finally, retouching – don’t have PhotoShop yet on my new computer and my retouching skills are limited, so I had to make due with iPhoto tools. I actually did a tremendous amount of retouching as you can see from this example. So the process came down to: Shooting in my closed garage on a glass table with random lights placed underneath the table for the underglow effect. I shot two images of each bottle with the camera in a set position (but did not have a tri-pod, that would have been nice). It was cranked out in two same-day sessions while Tristan was asleep or with the wife. The images were downloaded and then sat for 8 months before I carved out time to retouch and ready them for the web.
Enjoy.
