Most people know me for events and portraits, but what a lot of people don’t know is that I take great joy in doing clean, luxury product shots. When Yachtsman Bourbon needed photography for their new bottle, I jumped at the chance.
The Product
Yachtsman is an ultra-premium Kentucky bourbon made in Bardstown by Better Spirits LLC. It’s an 80-proof rye bourbon with tasting notes of toffee, buttery caramel, and subtle honey. The brand is positioning itself for the yacht club, country club, and coastal lifestyle market - a different lane than your typical Kentucky bourbon, and the bottle design reflects that. It retails at $99.99 and features some interesting design firsts: an ergonomic neck, a stabilized base they call the “Perma-Base” built for wet or moving surfaces, and an integrated pour channel called the “Pourz” that reduces spills. It’s a bottle that was designed to be photographed.
The Shoot
I shot these at my studio here in Louisville. Product photography is a completely different discipline from event work. There’s no chaos, no chasing the light, no candid moments. It’s the opposite. Everything is controlled - the lighting, the angle, the reflections, the background. You’re telling a story about an object, and every detail matters.
With a bottle like this, the goal was to communicate luxury. Clean black backgrounds, precise lighting to pick up the contours of the glass and the gold lettering, and tight detail shots that show off the design elements that make this bottle unique. The client needed images for their website, social media, and pre-launch marketing materials, so the deliverables ranged from wide hero shots to tight macro details of the cap, the spout, and the label.
Louisville Product Photography
Louisville is a bourbon town, and I love that product photography for distilleries and spirits brands is becoming a bigger part of my business. Whether it’s a brand new label like Yachtsman or an established name on the bourbon trail, I bring the same attention to detail and the same studio discipline to every product shoot.
If you’re launching a product and need photography that makes it look as good as it tastes, check out my commercial photography portfolio or get in touch through my contact page.
