Unleash the Kraken

Picked up this bottle of rum a few nights ago and decide to shoot it. I didn’t have a plan or idea of what to do with it so I just started in the studio with a single light. I love the dark on dark but it needed some light. I started off shooting close up and then got further away.

As you can see I was shooting with a single ring light. but some areas of the bottle needed a bit of lift. I have these small cards that worked perfect. I positioned them in various places to get the light just right. (Excuse the mess behind me.)

I tried sticking stuff in the foreground to give it some depth and a few objects worked and some didn’t. In the end I only took a few shots and here is what I got.

This was the image I decided to start with. This one has some exposure adjustments but thats it. After some searching around and thinking of different concepts I settled on a bottle in the middle of some water and a tentacle wrapping around it. I search the interwebs and grabbed some images and went to work.

I used these images to make the composite below. It was fun creating something just to create it. No direction, no agendas, just messing around in photoshop and keeping the skills sharp. I did a lot of adjustment layers and tweaking. All in all it was pretty fun.