Angle

Learning to Shoot an Ale-8 Bottle a Hundred Different Ways
by Tim Webb

In the Bluegrass State of Kentucky, Ale-8 One is the soft drink of choice for many. It has been a daily staple for me since I was a kid. I had a student photographer once who only wanted to shoot the good stuff, like pretty girls and sunsets. Basically, he didn’t want to work at turning something ugly into something beautiful, through the lens of a camera. So I developed a little exercise called “Learning To Shoot an Ale-8 Bottle a Hundred Different Ways.” The point I wanted to make, was not all photographs can be of sunsets over the Grand Canyon, or of Miss U.S.A. A good photographer can make anything look good with good light and good angle.

There were always Ale-8 bottles sitting around in my office, so I gave him one and said, “Here, see how creative you can be with this bottle.” The point of this exercise is to get your creative juices flowing and really apply your creative mind, you should be able to photograph an inanimate object several different ways and make it look good. Okay…maybe not a hundred, but several.

I eventually applied the exercise to myself, and it’s turned into an on-going project. I wanted to see if I could achieve 100 different photos of an Ale-8 Bottle. I’ve photographed them on the beach, in the snow, on my desk, and I even frozen a bottle and photographed it in a block ice. Currently I’ve come up with about 60 different ideas.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 9:48 pm. It is filed under Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.