Rum & Reggae, serious rum
Clean pack shots had their place. But photographing these colourful bottles became much more interesting when I took them outside and started exploring the garden.
A little bit studio, a little more garden
Product photography often begins with control: controlled lighting, controlled backgrounds and carefully controlled reflections. And that's exactly where my work with Rum & Reggae began.
The bottles themselves were anything but restrained. Bright labels, bold flavours and plenty of colour gave the Serious Rum range a personality that seemed to demand something beyond a conventional pack shot.
So, having captured the clean product imagery, I took the bottles outside.
And that's where I started having rather more fun.
The garden became the studio
One of the pleasures of photographing products is discovering that you don't always need an elaborate location or complicated set. Sometimes you just need to look properly at what's already around you.
My garden suddenly became a collection of miniature locations. A weathered log offered one backdrop; stone and gravel another. Ferns, grasses and leaves introduced layers of green, while changing natural light altered the character of a photograph simply by moving a bottle a few feet.
There was something wonderfully simple about wandering around with a bottle of rum in one hand and a camera in the other, looking for combinations of colour, texture and light.
Admittedly, this may also have caused some curiosity amongst the neighbours!
Finding the photograph
What interested me most was how differently each bottle responded to its surroundings. Against foliage, those vivid labels jumped from the greens. Timber brought warmth to the amber liquid, while stone created something cooler and more graphic.
None of the settings needed to overpower the product. The challenge was finding enough texture and atmosphere to give the photograph character while still allowing the bottle to remain the subject.
It's a simple approach I've always enjoyed: start with the product, look at its colour and personality, then build the photograph around what makes it distinctive.
“Great products shots, really happy with the work.”
Simon Smith · Owner, Rum Barn
One more bottle…
Some time after the original shoot, another bottle arrived: Serious Spiced Rum.
By this point there was really only one thing to do.
Back into the garden.
The new bottle joined the collection and gave me another excuse to explore the same idea — not recreating an identical photograph, but finding another little corner of the outdoors where the colour, texture and light worked together.
Sometimes the location is right outside the door
The Rum & Reggae shoots were relatively simple commissions, but they've always stuck in my mind because they demonstrate something I love about photography: the location doesn't have to be extraordinary for the photograph to become interesting.
A few bottles, some natural light and a willingness to explore turned an ordinary garden into a surprisingly useful outdoor studio.
And there are certainly worse reasons to spend an afternoon wandering around the garden with a bottle of rum.
Creating something
worth looking at?
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