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.

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

Or you can go to Picasa Web Albums and help yourself!

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 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.

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.

Firstly, I set up a very primitive white room in the lightest place I could find (the patio) using a large piece of white cartridge paper and some blu-tack. Then I dug out the tripod and attached the camera, lining it up nice and square on the “set”.

I cleaned a nice glass *very* thoroughly, dried it, and polished it with a lens cleaning cloth.

I chose a beer I had two bottles of — Summer Lightning — and put one (with cap) on the table. Then I carefully poured as near a perfect pint as I could. Without too much delay, I placed it next to the unopened bottle and started snapping away. I took about 15 photos, hoping that one would turn out OK. I didn’t use a flash — this puts big white spots on the bottle, and just looks weird. This is the un-tinkered with photo:

Then, using GIMP, I cropped the picture down to just the good stuff.

I then adjusted the levels of white (Layer > Colours > Levels). Auto did quite a good job, but I manually set the paper background to pure white (see this tutorial for more on GIMP’s levels controls).

Then, to further boost the image, and bring out the colours, I duplicated the layer and set the top copy to “overlay”.

That looks pretty good, and if you don’t like fiddling about, you could leave it there. But I spent 10 minutes carefully painting out the grey in the background, using a mixture of “magic wand” selections and careful work.

Finally, I played with the perspective feature (Tools > Transform > Perspective) to straighten the image up a bit.

I’m quite pleased with the results. Next time, I’ll add more light using reflectors — the bottle is a bit dark. I don’t know if I’ll do this *every* time I photograph a beer, but it really didn’t take too long, and the finished product looks very appetising. I’m drinking it now!

More after the, er, “more” link…

Click the photo above for a bigger version.