Hennessy Shoots a Campaign Based On Light Painting

Photographer Atton Conrad recently shot a campaign for Hennessy VS Cognac. This is no biggie other than the fact that photography approach was based entirely on light painting.

For those of you who are not familiar with the term, light painting is a technique where a camera is set on a tripod in a dark location @ long exposure, and captures the movements of light in the frame (you may want to check out this tutorial to get the general idea).

Anyhow, I think this is the first time I am seeing a campaign at this scale shot entirely with light painting, which could be a marker for light painting to start entering mainstream photography.

Atton Conrad did a short BTS (Behind The Scenes) clip. There is a longer one with my comments after the jump.

There is a longer version of this vid with more info on how the shots were made.

All those weird light sources – turns out that everything can be a light source, or a light modifier. There’s LED and orange gel, LED and marbles and LED with almost anything that you can attach with Gaffers tape.

Chaos [1:26] – One of the things that Conrad refers to is the chaos. Well, one of the nice things in light painting is that if you are working by hand (like Conrad did) each image is unique and it is very hard to replicate a shot. On the other hand, there’s lots of room for creativity.

Nothing says Hennessy color better than Hennessy [2:28] – As part of a quest to obtain the perfect Hennessy color for the shot, Conrad actually used Hennessy as a lighting gel.

Rims [3:03] – One of the nice things about the final image is that it has the “conventional” white rims on the bottle that usually come from strip lights. Not Conrad. He made those using light painting as well.

Black Ninja [3:21] – When you leave the shutter on for a long time, any non black object will register on the camera sensor. This is why they used cool black ninja suits.

Label [3:43] – And the label gets a special spot streatment by lighting it separately from the rest of the scene – note the focused light strip. Don’t think it was an LED light and a black straw, but would not be surprised if this was something similar

Ouch [3:57] – Hennessy glass breaks so light can go inside.

More [infinity] – This is not the first time Atton Conrad used light painting. His site features some awesome light painting + strobe images (among the top right images on the portfolio)

If you spot more interesting moments in the video, share them in the comments.

[via strobist]