Professional Beverage Photography Tips

Photography Tips

Professional still photography is all about precision. Precision in lighting, angle, look, feel, composition, etc. Rob Grimm, a commercial photographer with over 20 years of experience, talks about his latest shoot for Boulevard Brewing company. Grimm shares a few tricks of the trade including light setups and ways to make the beer look better:

Grimm is very specific about his lights. He knows exactly where he wants the light to fall on his products and how to put together an appropriate setup. A couple of the more interesting quirks about his setup is the polarizing filter he uses on the light to eliminate glare and the gold card he uses to bounce some light into the dark bottles of beer.

Grimm explains his lighting setup

Another interesting tidbit Grimm shares is that he uses a wooden chopstick to stir the beer to create more head in the foam. He does this over and over using a “beer pump” to extract the beer from glass once it goes flat so that he doesn’t have to move it.

Of course, with all that precision in his setup he wants to capture every bit of detail so he uses a medium format Hasselblad camera.

One of Grimm’s final image