First of all, this didn’t start in the studio. It all started with mood boards and product research.

Mood boards are great for seeing what is out there and what’s been done, and whilst we don’t want to copy someone else’s ideas, just looking at them can spark creativity and take you down a different path.

Product research comes into play once you have decided what you are photographing. Once we decided on a bottle (becasue of the difficulty of the shoot), I started popping to the shops to view all the different shapes and styles of bottles and see what inspiration came from them. When I saw the Bumbu bottle, I immediately had a vision of a pirate theme and black sand (mainly becasue I knew I had a bag of it in the studio)

So, armed with a fresh bottle and some black sand/grit, we started to get things together. Doing shoots like this doesn’t have to be complex to make the final shot look amazing, but you do need to know what is possible and how to get the desired look.  The main thing I do with bottle photography is use a piece of reflective card in the background to complement the liquid’s colour, giving it that perfect glow in the final shot. We had already decided that the main background would be composited later, since we wanted the final output to be a poster.

For the background image, I would usually have passed it over to a graphic designer to create something unique for us. Still, since this was an internal project, we decided to use AI, and I must say I’m pretty impressed with the final result. It took the brief I created (which is what I would have given a graphic designer) and made a fantastic image the first time. Now, I still had put the text onto the final piece as AI and text at the time were still not brilliant, but blending the bottle and sand in the picture proved to be a perfect fit.