David from Clean Bottle contacted me recently. He's launching a new product, and wanted new photography to kick it off.
We decided to do one heroic shot as a leader, and...
...a sort of survey in a more catalog style.
I wanted to do the water shot, and I wanted to give Dave a straight black shot, and I didn't want to light it twice, so I elevated it over black plex, and my assistant, Josh, built a short lip around it, to contain the water later.
To make ripples, we tried jiggling the plex, hitting the underside with a mallet, and streaming water in from a hose. After all, we found that shooting air down the front surface worked the best.
Channelling Irving Penn.
The bottle comes in four colors, but at shoot time, Dave only had a black bottle, a white bottle, and two Pantone codes.
I created the green and orange bottles from the white bottle, and put the four together in post, although the group shot above was done on set. I am slightly allergic to Photoshop, and much prefer to get it in camera, but at time like this, it just makes more sense to do it in post. Getting the colors right, since "color" is such a complex phenomenon, took a lot of finessing with the hue, and the value, not to mention different qualities and colors of light in the various shots.
A fast, very technical shoot to kick off a very interesting new product!
More info: There's a Square Bottle Kickstarter on through Oct 11, and they're already 75% of the way there.