Transcripts
1. Introduction: The key to getting this photo is implementing a really fun, subtle palm leaf shadow
in our backdrop. It adds an extra layer of
complexity and it helps tell the story of being on an island somewhere
sipping something magical. Oh, my name is Tabitha. I'm a product and
food photographer, content creator and teacher
here on skill share. Tiki cocktails are definitely my favorite kind of go to drink. There's never a
wrong time for one. They're juicy, and
tropical, and full of life. So join me in this class. A love letter to my
favorite kind of cocktail. I'm going to take you through getting set up and
preparing for the shoot. As well as getting your
light just right and actually making the drink and
shooting it in real time. I'm really excited to show
you everything I know about photographing these beautiful juicy
summer cocktails, and I can't wait to see what
you create. So let's begin.
2. Things You Will Need: Thanks so much for joining
me for the class project. We're going to be
lighting styling, making, shooting, and editing a
tropical Tiki cocktail. I'll be sharing this fun
lighting technique for getting a really subtle tropical looking
shadow in the background of our image as an extra
layer of storytelling. And I'm really excited to see
your take on this project. Don't forget to share your
final photos or your set up, anything along the way while you are crafting your
TE, cocktail photo. In the project section
here on Skill share. In the resources section, you will find a few recipes
which you can use to make either the cocktail
that I'm going to make or a smoothie mocktail, anything of your choosing, as well as some
fun garnish ideas. To get started, you
will need a camera, bright lighting at 45 degrees, a cocktail to shoot, and something that will
cast a palm leaf shadow. You can try to use a real or artificial palm leaf for your shot if you
happen to have one, or you can make one
out of garbage. Like I did, this is my bubble water cardboard
box leaf basically. I just drew all these lines and I had an arc and I
cut really long, skinny France on this trash. The nice thing about
this is my cat won't eat it because she loves
eating plants. Although that does look like a little tooth bite right there. But anyway, it's super easy to manipulate and I can get it, I can position it
just how I want. I don't have to feel
bad or like hurry. It's not going to desiccate,
it's trash anyway, so Yeah, highly recommend this. You just can't have any of it showing in the
picture because this obviously looks like cardboard. I will be shooting on a seamless
backdrop for this photo, but any simple kind of wall and floor situation
is going to do the trick. You basically just want
some kind of wall behind the subject so that your
shadow will fall onto it. I'll be using my
seamless vinyl backdrop clamped to a rigid backdrop, using alligator
clamps and brackets. We're going to be incorporating some tropical fruits to add
to the storytelling elements. Anything that could
be an ingredient in the cocktail, Maybe it is, or it's just helping to tell that story of like juicy,
fruity tropical vibes. Pineapple, coconut, fresh citrus as well
feels about right. And then most cocktail, most Tiki cocktails have a
lot of fresh mint as garnish. And so that is something that I definitely recommend getting
your hands on if you can. And then finally, I will be
shooting with my Nikon D 750. This is a DSLR camera. I picked this one
because I've been really loving shooting with
my macro lens lately. This is the Nikon one
oh five millimeter. It's fixed, but what the macro offers me is
like telephoto vibe. So it's bringing the
backdrop forward in the picture and it's making my cocktail really
just fill that space. There's no, you know, you don't get any of that
fisheye distortion on the edges if you're using
like a wider angle, like a 24 or 35, and so you have some
flexibility there. The only downside is because
it's slightly longer, you have to kind of give
yourself a little bit of space between you
and your backdrop. But I've been loving this. The sharpness is excellent, it adds a lot of bouquet
to the background. And so the background
is nice and blurred. The subject is crisp and clear, so that's what I'm
going to be shooting. You can definitely
use whatever lens and camera combination
you are comfortable with. I just recommend going toward like the higher
end of focal length. So 50 millimeter, 85 millimeter, anything above 50, but
not more than 120, is going to give you
kind of that sweet spot. This is going to keep
us in the range of avoiding a lot of
distortion while still making our subject appear
large and filling the frame in A really beautiful bonus
when shooting with the macro. You can also add in a few
little texture shots. You can get images
within your scene. That helps add
flexibility and gives you more things that
you can share and offer to potential clients. So now that we've talked about the project, camera garnish, garbage, palm leaf, let's dive into lighting
in the next section.
3. Lighting: For this shot, I'm going to be using continuous
artificial light. This is going to
give me the most control over my lighting. And I'm going to
shoot at night so that I don't have to
block any windows. I am using the aperture, 120 D, two light with a light
dome SE attached to it. Typically my light dome has
the diffusion panel on it. But for this shot, we are going to be using
the honeycomb grid. This basically hones
in the light so it's more directional and it also increases the
contrast ratio. So your high lights
are a little brighter, your shadows are
a little darker. But you're not
getting that harsh, hot, sharp light that you
would get from a bare bulb. So it's kind of a step between your classic diffused
light and your, you know, right in the
middle of the day, hot sun kind of light. I'm going to be honest
with you, I hadn't ever really used the grid on my soft box because
I've been happy with the light that I'm getting just using the diffusion panel. And it wasn't until I was
really trying to hone in on this specific shot that
it became necessary. And in figuring out how it works and what
I can do with it, I've been blown away by how much I can do with it,
like check this out. I'm going to turn this one off really quick
so I can show you. So when I have this
light close to my scene, it's bright, the
shadows are soft. It wasn't doing what
I needed it to do, but it was closer than when I had the diffusion
panel on there. But I was noticing
and clear across the room, my shadows were sharp. So I'm thinking, okay, if I just move this
back four feet now, the shadows from my
little palm frond are just a little bit sharper and it's going to be easier to get it to
look how I want. Bringing the light
backwards makes it physically smaller in
comparison to our scene. If you think about having diffuse the light,
a big soft box. We're stretching the light.
We're trying to make it as big as possible so that there's more area for it to bounce around and fill
in all the shadows. This is controlling the shadows. It's forcing them to go just
in this specific direction. And when we pull the
light backwards, it makes the light smaller
in comparison to our scene. Kind of like the sun in the sky. The sun is super bright. It's gigantic, But it's so far away that proportionally
it's quite small. And that's what creates
deeper shadows here. So that is the light that we're
going to be working with. I'm going to be
shooting from here, so my light is about 45 degrees across my scene and a little bit above this is going to create long shadows that go off
the edge of the frame. And then it's also going to put a bright highlight on
the edge of our glass. And we'll look
closer into that as we're actually like
taking the picture. But yeah, as far
as our scene goes, I've got this seamless here. It's kind of like
a sand texture, but it's going to be pretty
subtle for this shot. I've got it clipped
to a rigid backdrop. This tea glass is going to be a stand in so we can kind of figure out and get
this all tuned in before we bring our
real cocktail in. And then lastly, I want to
talk about the palm frond. It's going to go between
our light and our backdrop. And we want it to be closer to the backdrop than the light, because this is going to make
those shadows more defined. But we don't want
it to be so close that it's in the shot,
unless of course, you have a real palm frond, in which case that would
look great in the picture. As far as our lighting goes, we are basically tuned in. I'll turn this off
when we're shooting, just so that our shadows
are nice and dark. That's going to give
it that contrast and mood while still being
quite bright and beautiful. And then just outside
the shooting area is where all of
my garnishes are. I have mint cocktail
umbrellas, a lime slice. If you want inspiration, just search Tiki cocktail on Pinterest and you will get
tons and tons of ideas. Edible flowers,
orchids like people put all kinds of exciting
things on their Tikis. That is one of the reasons
I love them so much. Aside from being so tangy,
juicy, creamy, wonderful. Any time cocktail, they're always like over the
top, which is super fun. So let's get to
making our drinks.
4. Mixing up our Tiki: For this shot, I'll be making my go to Riff of a Tiki cocktail, which is usually some not measured combination
of pineapple juice, lime juice, rum and
cream of coconut. Sometimes I throw a slash
of orange juice in there. This time I have some
homemade grenadine which will add kind of
a cool sunset effect. So I will put
actual recipes with real measurements in
the resources section, as well as some non
alcoholic options, smoothies, et cetera. So we are going to just measure everything into
this mixing glass. I'm going to do 1
ounce of lime juice. I'm going to do a
little more just because I don't have enough
for another cocktail, so just use it up. I'm going to do an ounce
of pineapple juice. I got to make sure
you shake that. I like these little tiny
pineapple juice cans because I can usually
never finish a whole one. Anything larger than that is
too big cream of coconut. It's best to actually
measure this one first because it's so sticky that it coats the
measuring device, The jigger is what it's called. Then I'm going to do 2
ounces of my spiced rum. You can use white
rum. Spiced rum, whatever kind of rum you like. And we'll get that
measured in the glass. And because I'm concerned
about having enough liquid, I'm actually going
to also add a splash of orange juice and I'll grab
ice while I'm over there. Just a splash, A
quick note on ice. I'm an ice snob. I really, really like
clear ice for cocktails. This is clear ice made from my home countertop ice machine. Basically, I used to go out of my way to buy ice from
the grocery store or from the gas
station because it's clear to make cocktails. I used to have a fridge
that made ice and it made these like kind of oblong
shaped white ice cubes. Basically, those fridges are designed to make ice so fast, it traps the freezer
air in the ice, and it makes them melt faster and kind of taste
like freezer a little bit. So if you can make an
upgrade for pictures, get that clear ice,
it's going to make your cocktails look
so much better. Antiqis also tend to have like crushed or pebble
ice, which is fun. You can absolutely just
use regular ice cubes. But in one of the shots that I did in preparation
for this course, I felt like the
cubes were so big in the drink that I wished I had taken the time to crush them. So I'm actually going
to crush some ice right now And put them in my glass
so that it's ready to go. Before we start
shaking our cocktail, you can use a canvas bag that's traditionally
what is used for this. It's called the Lewis bag. I don't have one,
but I have a towel, a clean kitchen towel, that I'm going to smack with a hammer on a little meat
mallon until it's crushed. So, you know, you had some, some things to think about. Okay. Think we got it. I have pulled out two
different glasses that I think would be
good for this drink. This one you have a lot
of vertical real estate, which looks really lovely. And then this one is more of a, I mean it's a beer snippter, but I think a little more
surface area for garnish. So I'm probably just going
to use this one this time. So with that in mind,
I'm going to just file these ice cubes right into
this glass, this crushed ice. See that gorgeous crush? It's not like shaved ice, but it's a good crush. So I need a little more ice. And we don't worry
about crushing this ice because it's just going
to be used for shaking. So I'm going to seal this up
and shake it for 15 seconds. That should be all
mixed and frothed up. Before I pour it into
my cocktail glass, I wanted to do a little
bit of this grandine. This is a simple syrup made with pomegranate and it's going to sink right to the
bottom if I want to. Sunset, look, this
will go way down. And then our cocktail
will go right above. I'm going to use the and
we'll just layer right in, right up to the wash
line. That's great. We want it nice and full and we are ready
to take it over. You can also, if you
want more of a fade, bring a little bar
spoon in there. I can get that mixed up just a little bit so we've got
a great little gradient. It looks juicy. Delicious. I have prepped this lime wheel. When I cut my lime in half, I cut another slice so
that I'd have a wheel. You can curve it and have it sit on the glass and
make like an S shape. Or you can just do the classic little shimmy into the side, which
is cute as well. But let's go ahead and take this over to our shooting scene.
5. Tiki Photoshoot: All right, so you are looking pretty close to where I'm going
to be shooting. You can see this side of
the glass is quite bright. And then this one is
in the shadow area, but the background right
behind it is bright. So it helps kind of make
that glass stand out. We've got this pineapple nearby. I love the yellow tones in here. He's almost past his, uh, freshness, and then this is a fresh coconut that I
thought would be fun. You've got this like
frothy, creamy note here. And just having the little
prickly guy, it's pretty cute. So let's throw some
mint sprigs in here. Tikis traditionally have a
ridiculous bouquet of mint, which is honestly the best ever. It's such a wonderful aromatic
to have in your cocktail. It smells so fresh,
It's really pretty. I picked this mint from my
front yard and I had to wash it really well because this is where the chickens hang out. But yeah, I am going to start
with two in the cocktail, and then I will throw a sprig down here in the foreground just for some visual interest. And then I want to add
one of these umbrellas. I think that this pink is
too similar to the cocktail. Same with the orange. But what I love about this yellow is it kind of nods into this like yellow green area
of the lime rind. So I'm going to get this guy all unfolded and just prop him. Oh, actually before I do that, I want to pull some
pineapple leaves. I'm going to try
to pick some that aren't too hammered or crinkly, and then usually these
are kind of dusty, so I want to just clean those off with a few
swipes of my thumb, and then this is ready. I'm going to go ahead
and tuck this back in here and try to
float it in the back. Oh, it looks like my cocktail
is a little bit unmixed. I'm going to mix that up just a little bit so it doesn't
look too curdled. And then, yeah, just make
sure that looks good. And I'm gonna stick
these back there. All right? Umbrella
right on top. Ooh, we need more ice. Okay, So I know if I add
ice it's gonna spill, so I have to lower
the wash line. Okay. Yes, I did
just drink some. Trust me, I'm a professional. I'm gonna shove this
ice in the back. This is just going to
provide basically like a landing board for
these props. Okay. This is going to be a little, a little crazy, but I just feel like we have
the opportunity. I have this little
orchid that's in bloom. My sweet, wonderful,
beautiful orchid. I'm actually going to look
and put it right in there. I just feel like it's special. It's so cute. That
looks so cute. I'm gonna grab my camera and
start shooting ice cubes. I love putting them in
the corner of shots. What this is going to do is add a subtle texture and help tell the story that we
just made this fresh, frosty drink and it
is like so fresh, the ice hasn't melted yet. Okay, so I am shooting at ISO 40051/200 and I love
it, it's so pretty. Let's bring this pineapple
in just a little closer. We'll sneak in a
little macro shot. So I like to, when I'm
getting a shot like this, make sure that I get our
classic straight on, so we're like at eye level with the glass that's gonna
make it look larger than life and you'll
be able to see all that beautiful dew on
the edge of the glass. It's not, it's condensation.
You knew what I meant. And then I like to get a 45 degree angle and then I like to come in and get
a gratuitous close up, really emphasizing
all the layers and the shadows and the texture. I kind of want to go wild
and bash this coconut open. This one has a score line. Oh, fresh coconut is like such an next
level play, I think. Oh my gosh, it's so cute
and that smells so good. Oh, but our cocktail, nothing's worse than
like, you're so stoked and you're so excited,
you see all the garnish. And then when you look at the pictures later, you're like, I wish I'd noticed when I
was shooting so constantly, like try to step back and make sure you're not missing
anything major. Oh, it's so cute. Okay, And while I'm
already set up, I love to take
advantage of my scene, my drink, and get a
completely different shot. This one doesn't
implement shadows, but I brought in
my Monstera plant for some beautiful
green, leafy layers. Mm, okay. I definitely think
I got something I love here. So let's grab our
drink and get editing.
6. Lightroom Edit: All right, I went ahead and imported all
of the images from our session and
starred my favorites. I have eight favorites
in here that I think are worth sharing on in serium. And so let's just polish them up so that they
look their best. So we are going to start
with this main shot. Here we have a very subtle leafy shadow
in the background. We're giving just a touch of
pineapple in the edge here. And I really think that
this shot is pretty classy. The first thing
that sticks out to me is that our horizon needs to be straight because
the glass looks like it's kind of tilting over. That was my bad. I should have
paid better attention when I was standing there
excitedly photographing this. And then I always like
to do an Instagram crop, which is the four by 58 by ten. It just shrinks this image a little so it'll fill
the screen on the phone. So I want to line this up. I'm going to put the
top edge of the drink on that third line
just because it gives me an
opportunity to include some of that ice chunk in
the front of the shot for, you know, a little bit
of depth and layering. Now that I'm looking
at the crop though, I might actually just
scoot it up just a little. There's something kind
of comforting about a bottom weighted
drink in a shot. And I think especially
that's true with such a top heavy looking drink, so yeah, feeling good
about this crop. Let's go ahead and
play with the colors. So first things first, I
usually up the contrast slider. I like a really pungy image, so I usually go up quite a bit. And then I will bring
up the shadow slider to kind of bring some
more information back into those shadow areas. And then I will punch
that contrast ratio a little higher by dipping my blacks down
just a little bit. Next I come down to
my detail drawer. I'm going to increase
the sharpening here. I usually take it about halfway. And then I drag up the
masking while holding down the option key and mask just the sharp edges which
are shown here in white. And then I want to also see what my enabled
profile corrections does. Sometimes it removes a vignette
and fixes any distortion. And sometimes that's what the photo needs and
sometimes it's not. And so I usually kind
of take back and forth until I decide what
I like for this one. I'm going to leave that
one checked and then I also want to do
some noise reduction. Wow, Reduce noise with A I. Okay. Well, let's see,
where's our noise? Okay. We can see
some noise in like the shadow area of the orchid. So I'm going to just noise
and see what happens. Oh, we got a whole window
enhanced click and hold. Okay. Oh, okay. So we can see the
raw and the after. I do think that the
after is very nice. Let's go 54. That feels like a good number. I'm going to hit
enhance. It says it's going to take
about a minute. Cool. It's making a D
and G using D Noise. It's fun when we can
learn together like this. Is this fun? Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur when
I'm using apps like this. And I know that's like not the thing I should
be telling you. I should be telling
you that I'm always on the cutting edge
of technology. But man, I just feel
like technology is just and just
improving so much. Alright, cool. Here is our
noise shot, that's really fun. I feel like the manual
noise reduction would have been a little faster. I would have been kind
of onto the next step, but it was fun to try that. I think if you had a really,
really noisy picture, like maybe if you were shooting
the moon at night and you have like a lot of
noise in the dark sky, that would be worth
the investment. But for here and now, I'm going to just stick with
my manual de noise until, until I have reason not to. I didn't notice this at first, but like there's vanilla bean specs from the
grenadine that I made. I used vanilla bean
paste 'cause I'm fancy. Anyway, it makes me think about dragon fruit
which is kind of fun. You'd never see it.
And if it bugs you, you could sit and
clone it all out. The only thing I would
consider cloning in this image is there's kind of a dark spot
on this piece of ice here and it makes me
think it's like debris rather than just a weird shadow on the ice, if that makes sense. Um, but yeah, I mean, other than that, I feel like
our cocktail looks great. Our scene looks great. I'm just going to get rid of there's kind of like a little, I don't know, flake of something
in the background here. And I feel like if it
doesn't add, it takes away. And so I like to remove
that kind of stuff and then I want to punch up the
color a little bit here. I like the vibrant slider. I'm going to just kick that up just a little bit and then I forgot to kind of check
for color temperature. Right now I'm editing
with a white background. The default is like
this dark gray. Something that I found is
really helpful is if you're editing a high key
image, a bright image, you want to switch it to have the white background so
that you can really tell like is my bright gray
background actually neutral? Or is it as bright as it seems? Because if you're editing on
these really dark backdrops, it can seem like your
image is bright. But then when you
go to export it and you look at
it on your phone, you're like, oh, this is
actually kind of kind of murky. So I'm going to kick
that back to white. And then I'm just going to kick our exposure up
just a little bit. I really want this
to be like airy, but still full of
like contrast in substance and all
that fun stuff. So I'm going to
dip my blacks down and then I'm going to bring
my clarity slider up. Just the hair and I
think we should be good. Let's go ahead and
hit the Copy button and paste it onto
our next image, which is a slightly
further away shot. So this should get us pretty
close to the same spot. This one is nice if
you wanted more of that background detail and
you wanted to show off more of that kind of crispy looking pineapple,
unfortunately. Oh man, I had really good intentions to shoot that when it was
looking super fresh. But, you know, life gets away, maybe you wouldn't
have noticed it if I hadn't pointed it out. In fact, maybe I'll dip the clarity down
just a little bit to try to give that
pineapple a little grace. But overall, I think the
shot looks really good. Let's throw this edit onto
some of our in picks. This one, I think
needs to be brighter. Overall, I love that
the contrast shows off this crinkly leaf and how textured and
beautiful that is. I would take the highlights
down in this shot though, just so that we can get
a little more detail in this foamy, creamy
coconut surface. And then for this shot,
if it's not bugging you, it's absolutely bugging me. This leaf in the corner. Let's see if the
crop removes it. Okay, The crop
removes it for sure, but it also cuts
off our umbrella. We can't have that. We can cut on the glass just like that. That is kind of the happy
medium that I would pick. This feels right. And then I'm even going to use the clone stamp
tool to erase that little pineapple tip it tried to sample
from the umbrella. That was so silly,
so I just had it sample from the tip of
the other pineapple leaf. That looks much better. I feel like that is a
very effective edit here, Lots of pretty color. This image is punched
in even more. This one I feel like should have a more dramatic edit to it. And so I'm going to bring kind of some
of that contrast up. We're going to bring
our shadows down, our darks down, and then maybe even some of
our highlights down. So it really kind of
adds some drama there. I'm going to try to add a
little bit of haziness. So I'm in the tone curve drawer and I'm going to click
on this white circle. This lets me grab the point on the far
left and pull it up. What this does is
it adds some like gray to the darkest black areas. And then if I bring the
top right point down, it'll do the same but
in the highlights. And so basically this takes our curve and it kind of
flattens it just a little bit. But what it does overall
or holistically, is it adds upon
drama to the image. So I'm just bringing that
dark one down, down, down. And then we'll throw a point in the middle
and see if we can kind of rainy day edit here
which is pretty fun. There's probably a
use case for this, it's not my usual style, but it's fun to
try and mix it up. So maybe I would share this one. Actually, I liked the edit
before the crop there. I could share this one
in stories and have, you know, maybe
like a prompt box or something on here that
would be kind of fun. But anyway, little detail shot. But compared to our bright and
juicy classic edit that's, that's a fun take on there. So next there is
our coconut shots. I wanted to edit one of these darker leafy ones where I set the cocktail on
the Monstera leaf. So I'm just pasting
my settings from previously and as you can see, I didn't change my
camera settings at all. And there was just more
shadows in this overall. And so we're going
to need to increase the exposure and I'm going
to ditch the clarity, so I undid that and then bring the blacks up just a little bit. I'm going to bring my
shadows in to try to get some more color in
that green leaf so that it looks really bright, and vibrant and beautiful. I'm bringing my exposure back
down just to touch and then I think I'm going
to tick back into the tone curve region
with the sliders. And bring my dark slider
up just a little bit. This is so cute. I don't like this little chunk of coke nut cream here on
the front of the glass. It doesn't look intentional, so I'm just going to edit it
out using the Bandaid tool. And then when I'm in
the Bandaid tool, I usually like to look around
and make sure there isn't any other thing that
I want to tweak. I still feel like it's a
little bright up in here, so I'm bringing that
high light slider down just a little bit to preserve the highlights in
our cute little orchid, and then let's give it our
little Instagram crop. Do we regret not stepping back? Only a tiny bit. We lucked out this time. We lucked out. That is so
pretty and I'm so excited. Yes, we're missing out
on those palm fronds, but I feel like I
was already set up, already had a cute cocktail. Wanted to try something new, and it worked out, so yeah, here is our kind of little
library of finished images. Tropical Tiki cocktail. Um, now it's ready this
year on Instagram. I'm really thrilled
with how it came out. The gradient, the separation, this like deep shadow side against the bright
backdrop that like subtle palm frond kind of like just sneaking into
the edge of the photo. And it's like
mimicked by the poky, pineapple leaves that are
sticking out of the cocktail. There's just, there's
just some fun story here. All the color is like
really just focused in on that drink and it just
looks so juicy and good. So I'm really happy with
how this turned out.
7. Final Thoughts: And that's everything. Thanks so much for
taking my class. I really hope that you enjoyed it and learn something
new that you can implement into your
work Moving forward, I hope that you come away
with a portfolio ready piece and the skills to apply this to other sessions
in the future. If you enjoy this class, don't forget to rate it
and check out my profile and see if there's
any other classes there that you might enjoy. I have over 30 courses
that range from creating your own backdrop to photographing coffee and
doughnuts and pancakes. Really just anything
that I want to have an excuse to make and
take a picture of. I'm definitely food
motivated, so yeah, if you have any questions
or suggestions, feel free to leave
those here in class or hit me up if you have an
idea for a future class. Thanks so much for
sticking around for me and trusting me
with your time. And I can't wait to see your project in the project
section. Thanks so much.
Tabitha Park, Product & Food Photographer
