Food and Drink - Raspberry Beet Juice

I’ve just recently discovered BurkleHagen, a local, upscale commercial photography studio that specializes in food photography. Saying that I’m uber impressed with their work would be an understatement. I’ve always been a huge fan of great product and food photography and though I’ve not really shot a ton of it myself, I know that it’s an extremely meticulous craft and the photographers who make a living off of it spend countless hours working on every detail of an image. BurkleHagen is no exception. They have a crisp, clean style that has inspired me so much that I decided to tinker around with some food and drink photos of my own in my downtime. Granted, I’m no where near their level when it comes to this stuff (and I didn’t have nearly the same amount of time to spend on it) but I have been pretty happy with some of my results so far. For this particular post, I’ll be focusing on my first semi-successful beverage shot - Red Raspberry Beet Juice. 

This particular photo was born simply of availability. I knew I wanted to shoot some type of colorful beverage and this RAW brand beet juice was the best I could find at the local downtown market yesterday morning. I styled with some excess green glass tiles that were laying in storage, a container of raspberries, a mint straw that I later made red, and, the leaf of a celery stalk. 

If lighting set-ups interest you (I know they always interest me) here’s a quick breakdown:

This image was lit with four Einstein e640’s - two in strip boxes to the left and right of the glass, one firing through a 4x4 silk from front left and a final one shooting through a set of quarter apple boxes that are acting as barn doors. You may also notice at the bottom of the apple boxes that I propped up an ND Filter case - that’s the block some of the spill onto the tile and keep the majority of that backlight to the glass and fruit. As a previously dedicated hot light shooter, I think I’m finally getting the hang of this strobe situation. It takes me a little while to get everything dialed in, but I’m getting there. 

And finally, for anyone interested, I thought I would also post a side-by-side of my original image (left) and my final, retouched image (right). Not a ton of post work on this particular image - light clean up, color shifting the straw to match the scene, some dodge and burn for depth and a final pass of color toning. 

If you liked this post and the more detailed breakdown of lights and process stay tuned as I hope to be able to post more of these setups and lighting diagrams in the future. As a self taught photographer myself who learned from other people’s blogs and insight I hope that these kinds of posts might help someone else down the road as well. 

Enjoy.