Stephen Stewart – Leinenkugel’s

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Janyon Boshoff – Pop & Spritz

A bottle of Leinenkugel’s towers over the Michigan lakes as hops and honey float around in the calm waters. While the campaign shot by Stephen Stewart for Leinenkugel’s evokes the setting of the Michigan lakes where the beer is brewed, it was produced no further than Sydney, where he is based. “We built two sets: the lake set and the still life set,” he says. “We wanted to create lakes, lakes, and more lakes!” Because his client wanted to recreate the Michigan lakes, Stewart had to mimic the environment as accurately as possible starting with lighting. “As a photographer, I always strive for my images to be lit with a single light source, so the lighting [required] fitted with my style of lighting. Mimicking the harsh sunlight brought with it the identical challenges as if you were shooting in harsh direct sunlight,” he says.

Stephen Stewart – Leinenkugel’s

Shooting bottles comes with its usual challenges, and attention to detail is crucial. “You have to backlight the bottle to illuminate the liquid inside and also graduate that lighting to give the liquid form,” Stewart says. “On top of that, you have to deal with reflective silver and gold elements on the label.” Each bottle also had to have a specific type of spritz to it. “The client was not looking for perfectly formed spritz; more a mixture of spritz with water runs and pockets of ice shards to give the bottle a just-pulled-out-of-the-Esky feel,” he says.

Stephen Stewart – Leinenkugel’s

Because the final image would have to be comped together, Stewart collaborated extensively with the Cream Electric Art team which handled the retouching. “We worked backwards from the retouching to the shooting to the lighting design,” says Stewart. The tight deadlines also meant that everything had to be captured in-camera as CGI wasn’t an option. “Generally, food and liquids are notoriously difficult to recreate realistically in CGI. That’s not to say that it can’t be done, but photo-real CGI honeycomb and hops floating in water wasn’t going to happen in the time frame,” says Inness Robins, from Cream Electric Art. Over two-thousand captures were delivered for retouching at the end of the shoot.