The Who, What, When, and Where

Introductions first. We're the Bottle Boys and we're pleased to meet you. Borrowing a favorite phrase: "This may be the wine talking, but we love wine."

Santa Cruz, California, USA, is where we call home. Our studio is an old barn built in the late 1800s; once home to a sash mill and later several bars. Neil Young played here in the 70s (1970s), so there is a good chance we're spinning some Neil Young vinyl while we work on your bottle pictures.

Our studio opened it's doors in 1971 to provide product photography. Since those days of large-format cameras and film, we've migrated to high resolution digital capture and, today, a large portion of our business is computer generated imagery from models. We create still images, animations, videos and interactive web experiences from computer models of our client's products.

So, it is a natural step for us, having a few vintner clients, to bring to life a process to make getting great images of your bottles and labels easier and more affordable.

Here is how we do it.

Back in the day, a long, long time ago, our vintner clients would lug a bunch of their bottles into the studio and we'd shoot them. Then, we'd take the images into Photoshop and clean them up and send them to the clients with a big bill. While waiting for the client's check to arrive, we'd drink their wine.

Skipping ahead to today. 

We've created computer models of the most popular bottles. What does that mean? It means we've taken a real bottle, measured every millimeter of it and recreated its shape in a computer program, so it is just a bunch of polygons. Zeros and ones to the computer. But, when we say the correct magic phrase while spinning backward three times, the computer can spit out all those zeros and ones into what looks remarkably like a bottle.

The progression of a bottle is remarkably cool, if not just a bit geeky.

 

We obsess over textures and light and labels. We get it that a bottle is just a bottle until you put a label on it. (And, some wine inside.) For us, it's all about the label. The depth of the glass and the texture of the glass has to be right. The color of the glass has to be right. The light we shine on it has to be right. We've looked at a lot of computer models of wine bottles and none of them could give us the result of a photo-real image. None. So, that is why we modeled our own bottles. 

Let's talk about labels.

Transparent moment: we've bought a bottle or two just because of the label. Don't hate us for our one weakness.  

 We could type all day about labels. But, suffice-it-to-say, we know your label is important to you, so we better make it real (looking). If it's printed on paper, it needs to look like it was printed on paper and glued to your bottle. That makes your bottle picture look real. What is the paper's texture? Is the paper varnished? The more accurate we can be, the more real the picture looks. 

One more thing. Color.

Have you ever seen a picture of one of your bottles where the color of the bottle wasn't right and the label just didn't look quite right? We've seen a bunch. In our process, we take your art file, with the colors your designer intended, and we apply that to the bottle, in the file, to ensure that what gets created matches what was specified. It's not hard. It's just important.

Thanks for your interest in us. We're the Bottle Boys and we're here to make getting great pictures of your bottles easy and affordable.

Questions? Email us. If you'd like to see some of our commercial imagery, visit the mothership web site.