Hold My Beer...I'm going in

When inspiration hits me I just have to go with it. We left some beers in a cooler outside and when they were taken out to be put away they looked really cool. The bottles and cans were so frosty and picture perfect. I kept opening the fridge to look at them. Then finally the urge came over me to do something with them - but I held it off because it was -2 degrees outside. After a few moments I finally gave in and gathered up some tools. 

I wanted to shoot this bottle on the ground in the snow. Since it was colder than a polar bears butt, I didn't want to fuss with setting up any lights and take time adjusting settings on this negative degree night. I formulated a game plan. I used a book light that my son got for Christmas. Some rock salt to act as "ice". And a Tupperware lid served as my tripod. My normal tripod was to tall and I wanted to be as low as possible to the bottle without having my camera sit in the snow. That large crystal didn't get used, it was to cold to experiment with.

I gathered up all the things, threw on my coat and got these shots below within 2 minutes. I used the lights from our Christmas decorations as ambient light and the book light as my main light source. Once I set my camera up and got the focus locked in I started snapping away. Each image I moved the light source and adjusted my shutter speed. I lit multiple locations on the bottle, from the neck to the base as well as the surrounding area. I took about 30 images and got the heck back inside. 

Once I got back inside I looked over the images and felt that I had enough to pull together a composite. As you can see my handy dandy Tupperware lid wasn't the best option for a tripod. But since its super simple to line up images in Ps I wasn't worried. Looking through the images I was able to pick out my favorite ten. Each image was only going to be used for very specific reasons. A highlight here and background there. 

Once I selected the images I wanted in Lightroom, I edited them in Photoshop with the Open as Layers in Photoshop command. From there I auto-aligned the layers so that they were all straight. From that point I started going through each layer to find my base layer. After I did that I placed a layer mask on every layer and starting going through one layer at a time bringing back what I wanted from each layers, adjusting opacity along the way. This gallery is of the images that I used with the final image being the one I created. 

Final image...

Overall it was a lot of fun and something that came together really quick. I learned somethings along the way and I see something things that I should have done differently. Side note: After doing all this I was to cold to actually drink the beer and it was to pretty to open. Next time I guess.