Retro Coke C&C welcome

Curious that my IBC soda thread and your Coke thread were next to each other, at least until I posted this. I like the coke riff. It might have been nice if one could see more of the detail in the dark areas of the bottle. How I get around that is drinking the soda before the shoot. Perhaps another shot with the soda in the glass? One thing I did was burn the edges some to keep the eye in the scene and, also, prevent too many bright patches near the edges. It helps to have software like Silver Efex that makes that so easy. What software did you use?

works for me I like it nice tonalities

Lovely shot. That looks incredibly refreshing!

cambau said:

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I don't see anything compelling about the composition to make it anything special other than a glass and a bottle. If you are going to do something like this, you really need to put some heart and soul in it. Otherwise it's just very mundane and ordinary. And those lights on top and the horizontal highlight just above the glass are so very distracting. This does NOT work for me, even though it works for others (for whom just about everything works--which makes you wonder).

But to paraphrase someone else, if you like, that's all that matters and pretend you never read my critique.

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The intent of this shot isn't clear to me. First guess would be a product-shot exercise, but it's really kind of lazy if that's the case.

The bottle and glass and pretty much centered in the frame, translating into static composition. The control (or lack thereof) of the reflections doesn't take advantage of them. Bright background elements are randomly placed and distracting. Even the angle of the straw, which might have added some interesting bit of dynamics, seems random and odd.

Technical aspects aren't helping, either. Helpful detail is lacking in both the important black areas (bottle) and light areas (ice cubes).

I can see where there might be some appeal to explore in the reflections and refractions of the glass and liquid, but this image doesn't do that, as those aspects comprise such a small part of the frame. If you get up close and really start to look at the light, and spend some time exploring different angles, different camera-to-subject distance, etc., you should be able to come up with something more interesting.

It might be helpful to ponder what, exactly, it is about an idea or subject is initially appealing, then make choices which accentuate and convey that.

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Nice shot. My suggestions for improvement are:

1. The bright area top of frame is distracting. I would have composed the shot to eliminate that or else use Lightroom to reduce the exposure/highlights in that area.

2. For me the image is a little too static/staged. This is due to two things. Firstly the subjects are a little too central. Second both the glass and bottle seem to have been placed so they are both directly facing the camera. We know what a coke bottle is so we don't actually need to see all of the logo. Turning it slightly to the side will make the image appear less staged and more relaxed.