Tag Archives: Beer

Let’s Pour a Beer!

This week’s Project52 assignment is called “Let’s Pour a Beer!”.

The specific assignment is: “We are going to pour a beer and catch the ‘head’ coming up“.

I had never tried to photograph anything like this before, so I was pretty uncertain about how to do it. Here is my story of how I got to the photo shown above.

Don Giannatti gave the strong hint that the light needed to be coming from behind the beer, and shining through it.  To start, I placed my empty Cheers beer glass on a piece of clear Plexiglass, which in turn was on top of some white seamless paper that extended up behind the scene.

This was my 11th shot, as I dialed in the position and power of the two strobe lights, and to get the exposure right in the camera. I could see the horizontal line at the back, where the Plexiglass ended. That was something that would just have to be taken care of in Photoshop later.

Time to get a beer out of the refrigerator.

It didn’t take very long for the condensation to form on the outside of the bottle. I hoped that would last a while!

Those of you who know me, know that I rarely drink beer. (I’m a red wine kind of guy.) The choice of beer was entirely Barb’s as a result of me just asking her to pick up a 6-pack at the grocery store, and the only guidance I gave her was “don’t get something too cheap”.

Time to start pouring…

Whoa… Better slow it down!

Hold your breath, and hope it doesn’t spill over – because then I’d have a heck of a mess to clean up.

OK, I got lucky!. No mess to clean up, but I didn’t get the photo that I was hoping to get.  Pour that beer down the sink, but not before I had a big sip. It tasted great for a light beer!

Wash and dry the glass, then get it into position for a second attempt.

This time, let’s start out by filling the glass about 1/3 of the way, and let that settle down for a while.

OK, now start pouring again, but much slower than I did with the 1st bottle. I also tried to get my hand a little lower, and more into the photo.

This is working out much better this time!

I really liked the deep penetration of bubbles under the surface of the beer at this point. In fact, this is the actual photo used at the beginning of this post – but before I did any finish to it in Photoshop.

This photo and the one 2 photos back were edited later in Photoshop to blur the horizontal line where the Plexiglass ended at the back. As a final edit, I cropped the photo to remove some of the extra white space on the left side of the photo – and that is shown as the opening photo to this post.

And I just kept pouring, until the bottle was empty.

And that is the end of my “Pour a Beer” story…. almost.

Here’s a photo of the setup that I used to make this photo.

It took a while to tear down and put away all of my equipment, but once I did, I got a chance to sit down and watch the end of the Baylor vs. Notre Dame women’s basketball National Championship game. I really enjoyed drinking THIS beer while I watched that game, too!