For my most recent project in photography we were tasked with taking an image of a glass product. I chose to reuse my bottle of vodka from Anestasia for three reasons.

1.

It is an interesting bottle design and so made the image more interesting.

2.

The bottle design assisted in removing flare from the image as it has many flat surfaces pointing in many directions.

3.

It was easier

The setup for the image was relativity easy as I was attempting to recreate an image created by Anestasia itself and because all I needed to do to set the product up, besides the lights, was to put a black cloth in the right position.

For the lights I used 3 lights. I tried to create a continues light source from the bottom of the bottle to the top by placing all the lights together with soft boxes. The lights were then shone through a white cloth and onto the bottle. For the front of the bottle I used a speed light that was attached to the front of my camera.

After the image was taken I used Photoshop to remove any creases in the various cloths, remove some blue and to add contrast to the image.

Recently I went to Botlierskop private game reserve and managed to capture a shot of a small and young lion pride.

I call it the gaze as all three of the lions in the image are eyeing the prize cattle that is on the farm, outside of the image frame, next to Botlierskop. The lions are unable to reach them of course as a fence separates them.

The image was taken at around 3 P.M on my Nikon D7000 with a 150-600 mm lens at max zoom which is why they seem to unfazed by my existance

The second one is taken a few moments after the first with the lions trying to find a way to get to the cattle.

For this image I wanted to try and showcase the results from on of South Africa’s most infamous cooking methods, The Braai.

This image was of course taken in South Africa.

Essentially what a Braai is, is a fire with a grid over the top of the fire and what you will usually find on the Braai is meat. The fire can be made through various methods such as gas or charcoal but many South African’s will tell you that charcoal is the only way as it adds more flavor to it.

So I decided to try and cook my own meat on the Braai. The meat I decided on was pork ribs, BRM, from Pick n Pay. Once the ribs were cooked I plated them up and prepared for the image.

I tried to showcase that when the Braai is done and the meat is cooked that not only meat is eaten with the meal. So to try and show that I included some lemons, also for the colour balance effect it had, and some lettuce leaves, they also gave the image a bit more depth of field.
However this did not show the full picture and was still missing a few aspects. So to fix that I added a beer, frothed to make it look more appetizing, and some salt and pepper shakers.

After that I was ready to take the image. I decided to go for a bit of a rougher lighting style to make the image feel more like it was taken outside, right after Braaing.

All in all there were some errors such as I could have maybe softened the light to remove some hotspots on the ribs but the image turned out very closely to what I wanted it to be

Below you can find a diagram of the lighting used( the person in the image references the ribs).

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton