Photography - From brew house to light house

I would not call myself a photographer by any means, but I do enjoy photography. No better phrase than a picture is worth a thousand words. It's cool to be able to incorporate another hobby into this one. That said, has anyone ever ran across a thread where folks share their passion of photography with their brews? I would be interested in seeing what setup they have. Flash arraignment, light boxes etc, lens choice etc.

What do you guys use who go through the trouble of taking it one step further than point and shoot?

Anyone interested in kicking off a thread designed from a photography stanpoint using our brewing as the subject content?


Camera Canon EOS 30D
ISO 400
Focal Length 50mm (80mm in 35mm)
Aperture f/4.5

Ok, but I think you should say something about the beer.



It's cold and snowing outside, but there's an Imperial Porter and a fire inside.

Nikon D70
ISO 200
Focal Length 50mm (1.5x crop factor)
Aperture f/9
Exposure 6 seconds

I was goofing around. I'd probably set the beer up on a table, move further away, use a telephoto lens and get some more light on the beer so that I could get just the fire in the background and highlight the beer next time.

satph said:

It's cold and snowing outside, but there's an Imperial Porter and a fire inside.

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My friend, it's 10* outside when I got home from work this morning and my heat pump is struggling to keep the house above 60. I can feel the warmth of that fire from here.

Great picture. Captured well. Did you try reducing your depth of field any? Slight blur to the fire. Get some good bokeh. lol

If I had that fireplace right now, I would be uptown!

I took one at f1.8 and 1.4 second.



Both were shot on aperture priority (I select aperture, camera selects exposure time), so the total amount of light gathered should be similar in both shots. Still the beer is much more under-exposed in the f1.8 shot. With a little extra light on the beer and something between f1.8 and f9, I think I could do a better job getting what you describe.

Stay warm!

This is a cool thread. I hope it takes off. I love photography but I have sort of a crappy camera. Maybe I'll get it charged up and take some snaps of my beer.
Great idea for a thread!

Don't let you camera sit ya back. Fire that thing up. I'm waiting on a few batches to bottle then I'll be trying to do a few myself.

I know there is already a few threads similar to this one, but I was hoping one would take off with a photography aspect in mind. We'll see how it shapes up.

All the best,

I recently proposed the idea of Beer Photographer to my girlfriend as she's interested in photography and I in beer. All I have so far are iPhone pictures so I rely on place setting to (hopefully) captivate my audience. Here are a few taken with an iPhone 5.


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

Cool pictures buddy. I cracked open a bottle of Mirror Pond last night. The first of this back for a carb check. I took the time to set up the camera, tripod, did a few test shots with a glass. Eventually I had everything set up which would capture a good shot.

I popped the lid, poured and grabbed 6-10 shots or so with different settings before enjoying the pour. Later on, I was sifting through the pictures with the flash card inserted deleting the ones I did not like.

Somehow I deleted the ones I was going to keep. For some reason, when my notebook is reading off a compact flash card, once deleted, it's gone. It does not go to the recycle bin. Stupid me, was a pretty good picture too.

Fortunately, I have 52 more bottles to try to get it right! I'll try to grab a few on my next off day and post.

A few that I have taken. Canon 40D and I think I used my 70-200 F4L IS for all of them.

Brett Fermented wheat with all citra hops:


Wild Blackberry Saison:


Brett Fermented wheat with all galaxy hops:

J343MY said:

A few that I have taken. Canon 40D and I think I used my 70-200 F4L IS for all of them.

Brett Fermented wheat with all citra hops:

Wild Blackberry Saison:

Brett Fermented wheat with all galaxy hops:

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Really nice. Great thread! Let me dig some up.

Here's a few. I'm very much an amateur, but I really enjoy photography. Wish I had more time to learn my camera and lighting.

J343MY said:

A few that I have taken. Canon 40D and I think I used my 70-200 F4L IS for all of them.

Brett Fermented wheat with all citra hops:
Wild Blackberry Saison:
Brett Fermented wheat with all galaxy hops:

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Great pictures and tasty sounding beers. Any interest in doing a homebrew swap? I would love to taste those!

Brewbien said:

Great pictures and tasty sounding beers. Any interest in doing a homebrew swap? I would love to taste those!

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None of those beers exist anymore, but I'm always up for swapping homebrews if you are near by. Where do you live?

J343MY said:

None of those beers exist anymore, but I'm always up for swapping homebrews if you are near by. Where do you live?

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Not near you at all. I'm in Portland, OR. I have a couple of Brett beers that I was hoping to swap to try someone else's and those happen to look outstanding.

Brewbien said:

Not near you at all. I'm in Portland, OR. I have a couple of Brett beers that I was hoping to swap to try someone else's and those happen to look outstanding.

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Thats too bad. I'm more than willing to share recipes and ideas if you want.

Wow you guys are killing me. What is the red one posted above? It looks too red to be blackeberry, but man that looks awesome! I've got my work cut out on trying to get something posted.

You never know how boring your house is till you can't find a backdrop to photo anything. Below is a Mirror Pond Pale Ale, took just a few minutes ago. Not exactly what I was hoping for, but it's something.

I think next time I'll try it with my 50mm 1.4. Always seem to have better luck with that one since I can get better DOF.



Camera Canon EOS 30D
ISO 400
Focal Length 85mm (136mm in 35mm)
Aperture f/5.6
Exposure Time 0.0333s (1/30)
Name IMG_2988.JPG
Size 3504 x 2336
Date Taken 2014-02-21 00:17:23
Date Modified 2014-02-21 00:17:23

File Size 2.90 MB
Flash flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode
Metering pattern
Exposure Program aperture priority
Exposure Bias 0 EV
Exposure Mode auto
White Balance auto
Color Space sRGB

Jeremy, that Saison looks AMAZING!!! ... Dont suppose you'd be willing to share the recipe would you?

J343MY said:

A few that I have taken. Canon 40D and I think I used my 70-200 F4L IS for all of them.


Wild Blackberry Saison:

Click to expand...

DuckiesRevenge said:

Jeremy, that Saison looks AMAZING!!! ... Dont suppose you'd be willing to share the recipe would you?

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I second that.

Brewbien said:

I second that.

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Third!

But also, how is it that you are posting on New Years Eve, 1969!?

That saison does look pretty damn good!

This is a great thread! I take pictures of brewing as a whole. I try to get unusual perspectives of the hobby, equipment, additives, lacing, etc... When a good shot hits me I just take them with my phone so they're not super great quality like these pics are. I have an alright camera but I can't find the charger for it. If I ever do I'll start posting some of the snaps I take.

Keep up the pics!

Very nice!

DuckiesRevenge said:

Jeremy, that Saison looks AMAZING!!! ... Dont suppose you'd be willing to share the recipe would you?

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No Problem. The recipe was quite simple (5 gallons):

81% 2-Row
19% White wheat malt

2 oz of pacific jade late in the boil for about 25 IBUs

Wyeast 3711

OG: 1.055
FG: 1.005

I collected a little over 4lbs of wild blackberries from around my Dads farm and added them post fermentation for 2 weeks.

Keg - carb - drink

satph said:

I took one at f1.8 and 1.4 second.

Both were shot on aperture priority (I select aperture, camera selects exposure time), so the total amount of light gathered should be similar in both shots. Still the beer is much more under-exposed in the f1.8 shot. With a little extra light on the beer and something between f1.8 and f9, I think I could do a better job getting what you describe.

Stay warm!

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This is something I have been playing about with recently too. I do not know if this also applies to nikons but the exposure (in aperture priority mode) is set on the half-press of the shutter button. So if you set your camera to point metering on the centre point, aim at what you want your exposure set by and half press the shutter, when you then compose the shot as you want and complete the shutter press, the exposure is spot-on where you need it. Setting focus lock to another button other than the shutter helps this too as your exposure and focus might not be on the same point

I've got to find a way to discreetly trot around the neighborhood with a camera, select choices of lens, flash, tripod, china glass, and a few unopened, unlabeled brown bottles of homebrew looking for the perfect backdrop. Just how does one do this w/o getting the law called to you? Better yet, how do you explain what you are doing when stopped? Ummm, officer, i'm going to the woods to take pictures of my homebrew. Yeah, ok, if you say so. lol

My favorite lens is my nifty 50 1.4f By far the best glass I have in my bag of 8. Aside from my walk around lens, the rest of my glass hardly gets pulled from the bag.

I've always been into photography - I ramped it up when our first child was born and I wanted to take pictures that basically didn't look like crap.

More recently the pictures I take are mostly not artistic but more 'engineering' or factual. My equipment's fairly old - an older Canon 30D DLSR. What I find more important is the lenses so I've never scrimped on those. I shoot mostly with the following:

- Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM prime lens (for narrow depth of field aka 'fuzzy background', or low light work). I love this lens. It's on the camera 80% of the time.

- Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM wide angle lens (for wide angle shots). The perfect lens for taking indoor pictures and getting everything (and everyone) in the shot.

- Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS USM macro lens (for taking extremely detailed close-ups).

- Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM zoom lens (a general purpose zoom lens).

I use an external Canon 420EX flash with a Gary Fong diffuser when needed. The tripod is a Manfrotto 055XPROB with a Manfrotto 322RC2 head.

I shoot 100% RAW and develop using Phase One Capture One Pro 5 for ultimate control of colour balance and exposure. Some post-processing work is done with Adobe Photoshop when required.

Me taking a really exciting picture of a stainless Tee:



The resulting picture:



Sometimes I get to do slightly more artistic shots, like this one:



The glass was photoshopped after the fact to enhance the condensation (cold & wet) look. Food shots are really hard. I would have liked to have the glass more full and overflowing too (catching the moment the beer overflows slightly) but that's a LOT of work and could easily take half a day of shooting and an entire keg of beer just to get that one shot.

Kal

kal said:

- Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM prime lens (for narrow depth of field aka 'fuzzy background', or low light work). I love this lens. It's on the camera 80% of the time.

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Hired one of these for a weekend to photo a christening for a friend - honestly didn't want to give it back ! Then I remembered they had a deposit from my credit card for the full value and I wanted to eat something other than baked beans for dinner for the next year

kal said:

I shoot 100% RAW and develop using Phase One Capture One Pro 5 for ultimate control of colour balance and exposure. Some post-processing work is done with Adobe Photoshop when required.

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Shooting RAW was something I could never fully understand. Better said I guess is that I understand what RAW is used for, I just never been able to learn how to use that resource properly. I probably still have several hundred gigs of old photo's saved in RAW for the day I might learn how to edit using that format.

I have some older versions of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Lightroom, but beyond basic editing have never been able to gain my footing using those programs. About the only thing I've ever taken full advantage of was my Smugmug account for photo hosting. lol

I started to shoot RAW (and still do) partially as a crutch: I don't have to get the exposure perfect nor do I have to worry much about the lighting colour temperature at the time of the shoot. I can fix it later. More important when you're in a hurry and don't have time to get things dialed in right... it moves the work to later when you have time.

Kal

Exactly, Kal...If you want to tweak the color temp or exposure, it's a LOT easier to do when you have all the data on the photo, whereas with JPEG you're limited to whatever was saved...