BTS Per Our Last Email Cocktails

Hey everyone! First of all, my apologies for the lateness in this post. It was like we were in a slow season and then suddenly, BAM! We got hit with some projects that took over my life these past few weeks, haha! :') AKA why I didn't get to posting this BTS sooner. Thank you for giving us grace, as always! Anyway, I've been having some major fun shooting all of our Per Our Last Email cocktails and just treating them as "mini" personal projects where I try out different shooting techniques/styles. If you're unfamiliar, Per Our Last Email is our freelancing comedy podcast where we either invite guests to come on and share their wild freelance tales or read listener submitted stories as ridiculously as possible! It's honestly so much fun and we love creating it! This last set of cocktails in particular though was great because the theme was all about those classic college cocktails. 

For these photos, I thought it would be fun to go with a "hero" image style for each cocktail because didn't we all feel a little "on top of the world" when we were that age?!?! Just me? OK. Haha! Moving along... I wanted to give the images some edge and I tried to think about what the vibe would be like if these "cocktails" lived in a sort of club atmosphere. Ok maybe that was just me and my college experience but honestly, I loved going out during that time and still do so I actually pulled some inspiration from a photo I had just taken the weekend before in Oakland at a club/lounge. I wanted to emulate the multiple colored lights coming from the ceiling/walls and bring that into these images. 

The ~Inspo~

I think this may have been one of the only times we've ever actually used our Profoto gel pack and as I was shooting with them, I realized that it probably would have been cheaper to just purchase colored gel sheets instead. For some reason, Elle and I had it in our heads that we needed to buy the Profoto ones because it would be the easiest to place on our Profoto lights. Nope, you can literally just buy the colored gel sheets from Amazon instead and it would honestly end up being the same. SO! Don't be like us and just purchase the gel sheets instead. It would probably be easier to maneuver anyway, haha! 

For the lighting, I decided to go with two umbrellas placed on each side of the cocktail vs our usual one light strobe setup. Like I mentioned previously, I wanted to play around with the colors of the gels and how they would interact with each other onto the cocktail and backdrop. I did play around with the placement of the lights as well by moving one more in front of the cocktail and to the side and another more towards the back and behind the cocktail. It was honestly so fun getting to just experiment and seeing what worked. At one point, I even put two gels on top of each other onto one light to see if I could get a variation of color there. One tip that I can give is to use your modeling light to see how the colors interact. Obviously you shouldn't leave it on for long since the lights do get pretty hot and you don't want that melting your gel sheets but it was a nice way to get to see how things were looking.

Since I was shooting the hero style type of image, I used black seamless as the main backdrop behind the cocktails while using some kind of prop to give the cocktail some height in order for me to shoot up from below. This set of "hero" images was actually a bit of a learning experience for me since I was so used to shooting cocktails from above that I had to quickly figure out what the best way of highlighting the garnishes were. I had to get a little creative and place some of the garnishes in a way that they would actually be seen. Like the three maraschino cherries for example. Placing them how they would normally be on a cocktail would not have shown up at all in a hero image so I really had to style them almost to the edge of the cocktail (and propped up by the ice cubes) so they'd actually be seen. 

Overall, it was such a fun experience and I highly recommend playing around with your imagery as much as possible. Some of the final images can be seen over on perourlastemail.com/cocktails and below you can check out a bit of BTS. Let me know if you guys have ever shot with gels and what you found to like about them, if they were tricky, etc!

Is it the weekend yet?
Arabela