Corona on the Beach
No trip. No client. Just a studio, some sand, and a heatwave.
It was one of the hottest weeks of the year, and my studio felt like a sauna. All I could think about was a cold beer on a beach — so I built one myself, right here in my studio.
The idea was more of a feeling than a set: sunlight, sand, that first cold sip. Corona was the obvious pick from my glass collection, and a slow-mo lime splash felt like the perfect finishing touch.
This project ended up being two sets — the glass first, then a row of bottles, built on the same sand under the same light. A few extra setups came together along the way too — stories for another time.
I opened a couple of sandbags and tipped the sand straight onto a tabletop — instant mini beach. That part was easy. Getting it to actually look like a beach wasn't. Hours of shifting the glass, testing angles, swapping props, watching it stubbornly refuse to be anything more than a pile of sand with a glass stuck in it.
A second set followed, built the same way but with bottles instead of a single glass. Same table, same sand, same lighting new problem: the drip. A few glycerin-and-water mixes later, one finally looked like real condensation. Each bottle got the glass treatment — cleaned, taped, sprayed, dressed by hand — with a few spares kept ready, because one wrong touch meant starting over.
Each bottle got the same treatment the glass had — cleaned, taped, sprayed, dressed by hand — with a few spares kept ready. One wrong touch and you're starting over, and that happened more than once.
The light stayed the same across both sets: a Fresnel standing in for the sun, balanced with a top light and a big diffusion on the left to keep the shadows soft. And a 4th light on the background to tie it all together.
One trick did more work than the rest of the kit combined — an A4 whiteboard tucked behind the glass, bouncing light straight back into the beer.
The second set borrowed the same setup — same logic, though everything had to shift a little to cover the extra ground, since the bottles took up a lot more real estate on the table than a single glass ever did. It also picked up a few tricks of its own: clamped-in leaves to fill an empty corner, custom foil reflectors for extra life, and a mirror to catch the labels on video.
Stills and motion split the technique between the two sets: the bottles leaned on heavy focus stacking to get every drop sharp front to back, while the glass leaned on high-frame-rate slow motion to catch the splash. Flash for stills, LED for motion, on both sets.
Glass
Canon 5DS R, ISO 400, 1/160 s, f/16, 135mm TSE
Bottles
Canon 5DS R, ISO 100, 1/160 s, f/16, 45mm, ~100-frame focus stack.
Glass
URSA G2, 300fps, 2K, ISO 400, f/4, 1/2000, 24–105mm at 80mm,
Bottles
URSA G2, 4K, 60fps, ISO 400, f/4, 1/120, camera movement added in post
For the bottles, the real work happened in Photoshop after the shutter fired — around 100 frames stacked front to back for focus, then reconstructed and cleaned up wherever the stack missed a spot.
Motion told a similar story from two angles: the splash sequence blends two takes — one for the splash, one for the lime — while the bottle footage picked up its camera movement afterward in post, since shooting at 4K left enough room to fake the drift and pull-back convincingly.
The glass splash needed the biggest rebuild of the three: five favourite frames out of 300, masked together in Photoshop — lime, splash and drip blended in, stray condensation cleaned up, a vignette added, and clouds dropped into the sky behind it.
That's the short version. The full builds and the edit — bottles, glass, and the whole compositing process, stills and motion — are covered start to finish on my YouTube channel, if you want to see the long way round.