At 9am, Brussels is full of trucks delivering beer to bars and restaurants.
A truck full of Duvel, Orval, Troll, St Bernardus and Bush beers.
The man driving this truck actually did look like the cartoon on the back.
I found this brilliant tutorial via Lifehacker and had a quick go at turning a boring photo of a pub into a more interesting one.
Before the vintage effect is applied...
...and after. The pub is the Angel in Bermondsey, by the way.
Expect to see this effect annoyingly often around here for the next few weeks…
And here’re our previous photographic efforts (one and two), if you’re interested in this kind of stuff.
Bailey
Two more bits of old pub livery spotted on Mare Street in Hackney at the weekend.
We’ve put some of our beer photos online for people to use on their beer blogs, should they find themselves in dire need of a picture for a post.
Here they are in a little slideshow:
http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf
Or you can go to Picasa Web Albums and help yourself!
A couple of months ago, I spent some time off photographing my pint of Summer Lightning. Tragic, I know. But I’ve gone further — I spent today building a special light box specifically for taking risque images of flirtatious, nubile glasses of beer.
Here are some sample photos:
I didn’t do anything to either photograph in GIMP, other than shrink them for the web.
I say “built” but, not being a proper man who’s comfortable with tools and wood, it’s actually an old carboard box modified with a Stanley knife and Sellotape.
I cut holes in the top and one side, which I covered with greaseproof paper. I then put in a large sheet of white card, curved from the top at the back, and Velcro-d in place. I used Velcro so I could put in different coloured card. Here’s a photo of something other than beer, with a red background:
For a light, I used two angle-poise type lamps with daylight bulbs, one shining through the greaseproof paper on the top; the other shining through the greaseproof paper on the open side.
The end results aren’t perfect, but they’re my best beer photos yet.
Bonus tip: use your camera’s macro mode for close up shots, usually indicated by a picture of a flower. The difference can be amazing.
I’d like to live in this building.
I took these photos on my wander round Walthamstow the other day, but I’m not the first person to have spotted it. It’s on Edward Road, at the bottom of the market, near the marshes, and is abandoned.
I’ve often wondered how they got those very attractive pictures of the beers in Michael Jackson’s 500 Great Beers book, and I’ve also been increasingly frustrated at how bad my own photos are. They tend to look like this:
So I spent a few hours trawling the web for tutorials on how to photograph food — this was a great one — and then tried to use some of the same techniques to photograph a nice pint of beer using my very basic digital camera. Here’s the result:
I’ll tell you how I did it after the jump, if you’re interested.
Truman, Hanbury and Buxton were one of the biggest breweries in London in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They moved to Burton in the 1970s, merged with Watney Mann not long after, and then closed altogether. East London — the area immediately around the old Black Eagle Brewery — is particularly rife with small reminders.
More after the, er, “more” link…