Nothing makes me more thirsty than a good cocktail image. I first met Carrie Bringle owner of Peg Leg Porker a few years back while photographing the Kentucky State BBQ Competition for a client. I had to get a few shots of Carrie and his competition team for my client as part of a larger story on the competition and the city of Danville, KY. The shoot went well and I went along with life. About a year later one of my other editorial clients reached out for me to do an editorial shoot with Peg Leg Porker Whiskey. This time I met up with Carrie at his restaurant in the heart of Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood. I got to know Carrie pretty well on this shoot and when it came time for his team to pick out a photographer to do a new photoshoot I was on the top of the list. The team needed some new shots of their whiskeys on both white and black backgrounds, some cocktail shots, and some environmental shots of Carrie and the restaurant. We spent a full day on set creating this shoot. We kept things pretty low key with just one assistant and having Carrie create the cocktails and be our model.

White Line Black Line

One of the most common request that I receive on whiskey shoots for for images on black and white of each product. I call these White Line Black Line images. I will typically shoot these images at the same time. The image with the black background has white highlights on the edge of the bottle that run the full length of the bottle. The image on white has full length black shadows on the edges of the bottle. These are actually some of my favorite images to produce. The 12 year old black bottle here is a difficult one to shoot becuase it hsa a gold foil label. We did a good job here of ensuring that you could read all of the gold foil. There is something that I really love about creating emotion in these bottles.

Hero Bottles

Often clients want to mix it up a bit. So in this case we put the bottles soon a cool table with a dark black background so that the bottles kind of pop off the page. The last shot in the above set was a quick grab shot, but I love the way it turned out. Sometimes being flexable on set is when we get our best content.

Pour Me A Drink!

A big part of shoots for whiskey shoots is shooting some cocktails. Or simply whisky neat with ice. There are plenty whiskey snobs out there, but I’m not one of them. Drink what you want the way you want it. There is no wrong way to drink whisky.

Restaurant Photography

Sometimes shooting some whiskey also means shooting some interroirs. In this case we photographed two spaces for the client.

The Face Of The Brand

Every brand has a face. Part of bringing brands to life is telling the stories of the individuals that make them up. We were super glad that we had an amazing location for these portraits.

Wrapping It Up

To sum it all up we created a broad libary of images for our client in just a single day shoot. We could spend a week shooting this type of content and I would love to do it. I can’t wait for the next whiskey shoot. Nick Bumgardner is a Nashville, TN based food and beverage photographer.