Question 1

Does FoodShot send a photographer to my distillery or run a studio shoot?

Accepted Answer

No. FoodShot never sends a photographer, never runs an on-site or studio shoot, never designs or prints labels, sell sheets or packaging, and never mixes, builds or fabricates a drink for you. It restyles photos you take yourself. You pour the real spirit you actually make, build the real serve your brand actually recommends, take a phone photo of it on your own counter, upload that photo, and FoodShot re-lights and re-stages that exact image — the same bottle, the same liquid, the same can. What changes is the light, the surface underneath and the background behind. What does not change is the product: if your gin is water-clear and your cask finish is a pale honey rather than a deep mahogany, they stay exactly that. That matters commercially as well as ethically, because a buyer opens the actual bottle a fortnight after they saw the sell sheet, and a brand that markets a liquid it does not make gets found out on the first pour.

Question 2

Bottles are mirrors. How do I stop the whole room ending up on the glass?

Accepted Answer

This is the specific reason spirits are harder to photograph than almost any food. Glass has no surface for light to land on the way a plate does — it transmits, bends, or throws a hard mirror highlight straight back at the lens, which is why a phone flash turns a bottle into a dark shape with a white scar down it and a small picture of your ceiling on the shoulder. The styles written for this trade solve it the way a product photographer does: a broad feathered source from behind and to one side, and a black flag on the other, so each flank reads as one long controlled gradient rather than a scatter of hot spots. For your own capture the practical rules are short — turn the flash off and never use it on glass, stand so nothing bright and busy is behind you, wipe the bottle down first because every fingerprint survives the restyle, and step close enough that the bottle fills most of the frame. The restyle supplies the rest.

Question 3

Will my label still be readable, or does the restyle blur it?

Accepted Answer

The label is the part that has to survive, and it survives from your capture rather than from the restyle. What the restyle controls is light, surface and background; what it cannot invent is detail your camera never recorded. So the single habit that decides label quality is focus distance: hold the phone about a foot and a half from the bottle, tap directly on the label so the phone focuses there rather than on the shoulder or the background, hold still for a full second, and take three frames instead of one. Shoot the label square-on rather than at an angle, because a label wrapped around a curve goes soft at both edges no matter what happens afterwards. Keep the bottle out of direct sun, since hard midday light clips the paper white and destroys the print before the image ever reaches us. Do that and the restyle gives you a sharp panel sitting in controlled light — which is exactly what a retailer portal and a printed sell sheet need.

Question 4

My tasting room is dark and the back bar lights are orange. Is that photo usable?

Accepted Answer

Almost always, yes — and it is the normal case rather than the exception. Nearly every tasting room in the world is lit two or three stops under what a camera wants, with warm bulbs that push everything toward amber, and that is precisely the input this is built to take. What matters in the frame you capture is not the lighting, it is the information: hold the phone still, get the glass or the bottle in focus, fill a reasonable part of the frame, and do not shoot with a bright window directly behind the subject. The colour cast, the muddy shadows and the cluttered service counter behind are all things the restyle replaces. What it cannot recover is a frame that is genuinely out of focus, or one where the subject is a small blur in the corner of a wide room shot. So the most useful habit is to step closer than feels natural. One steady frame from eighteen inches away in bad orange light beats a beautifully composed shot taken from across the room every single time.

Question 5

Can I get a whole RTD range and a full sell sheet looking like one set?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and doing it in one sitting is much better than spreading it out. The reason ranges usually look inconsistent is that products get photographed as they become available — one can in the cold store in March, two on a desk in May, the last two the night before the trade deck goes out. Different rooms, different bulbs, different phones, different angles, and no saved look tying them together. Instead, clear an hour, put every SKU on the same surface in the same spot, shoot each one from the same distance and the same height, then run the whole batch through a single saved style. Every can comes back with matching gradients, matching condensation and a matching shadow direction, which is exactly what a listing grid needs. The same approach builds a trade asset set: bottle, can, finished serve and miniature, all shot in one session and all restyled the same way, so the sell sheet, the portal upload and the shelf talker agree with each other.

Question 6

What should I shoot for a serve suggestion a bartender will actually copy?

Accepted Answer

Build the drink exactly as you want it made, then photograph it as a specification rather than as a mood. Use plain unbranded glassware in the shape you are actually recommending, because the glass silhouette is the first thing a bartender reads. Fill to the level you want poured, since a coupe filled to the rim and one filled two-thirds are two different recipes to anyone copying it. Make the garnish unambiguous and place it where you want it — a wide expressed citrus swath draped on the rim, a single cherry sitting on the base, a herb tip torn rather than cut. If ice is part of the build, use one large clear cube instead of a handful of cloudy machine ice, because clear ice photographs as intent and cloudy ice photographs as an accident. Then take one steady frame from just above the rim line, close in. The restyle handles the light, the surface and the background; the build has to be right in the frame you send.

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