The Balvenie 30 Year Old.

Here Design art directed the Balvenie 30 Year Old. The set is carved strips and intertwined leather, and it forms the frame the bottle sits inside. My job was to capture it as stills and motion off that one build. Leather and aged whisky are the same problem twice. Both absorb light, and whisky bottle photography that leans on a broad soft source turns the weave into a flat brown field and the glass into a silhouette. So I lit to hold the grain and the weave rather than to flatten them, raking across the strips so the plait keeps its depth and the cut edges take a line. The bottle is framed inside the structure and kept a step brighter than the leather around it, which lets the set hold the picture without swallowing the label.