A year of beer

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times before: I spent one year photographing every different ale or beer that I had in my home, and recently finished the project! The tough part wasn’t finding ales or beers to try, but to put the right lens on my camera and get enough shots to get one or two decent photos.

I called the project my Lensbeer project because I took all the photos with a selective focus lens called a Lensbaby Composer. It’s a fun lens that allows a particular area being photographed to be in focus with less focus the farther removed from that spot. The larger the aperture used, the smaller the area left in focus. It’s a great lens but a bit tricky to get used to using, as it adds another variable in photographing a subject… the area within the frame, regardless of other factors, that will actually be in focus.

The real purpose of the project wasn’t to drink more beer, but to force myself to learn how to use the Lensbaby Composer lens. It became such a habit, though, that it’s now hard to not take a photo of a new beer or ale that I try!

With the Lensbeer year now over (It ended on December 28, 2009), I thought I’d share a few of my favorite shots and/or ales. 2010 will bring something new in the beer/ale category at Livefire… I now have a beer making kit, and I’ll be brewing my own at home!

To start, here are my first and last of the series. The first was a nice winter beer by Spanish Peaks (which used to be in Montana, but I think it they stopped brewing and someone new bought the brewery/recipes/name to brew in Seattle). The second is one of my current favorites, Founder’s Old Curmudgeon Ale.

Some shots are done with a macro kit, but most are not.

I tend to try a lot of seasonal beers, largely thanks to a local store, Belmont Party Supply, which handles more different beers than most places I’ve seen anywhere, and they have just about everything available in singles, which is great. They also have been big in helping home brewers, and recently started a new store, Brewentsils, just for home brewing supplies and instruction. For the most part, I had about as many seasonal ales as any other.

Here are just a few of my favorites, no particular order to them:

This is an early shot of an English Ale. I started taking most shots on my kitchen counter, but this was one of the first taken on our dining room table instead:

And one of my first macro shots, using a 4x magnifier attachment:

This macro shows a busy label, where the focusing was in a way easier to notice:

The Lensbaby Composer can get some interesting bokeh, too (the blurred stuff away from focus):

I find that I tend to actually drink more ales during the cooler months, which sounds odd, but that allowed for some interesting backlighting using sunlight:

The Lensbaby also allowed for some interesting shots (to me, at least), showing the head on the ales, the texture, how it slides down the glass, if it’s heavy or light:

Some shots were just because of fun labels:

Some did a decent job of showing the color of the ale, whether very dark, or a nice pumpkin color for this pumpkin ale:

I used mostly available lighting, and took what I could get, but I liked some of the shots showing darker lighting to one side:

My year of exploring a bit pretty much confirmed some of what I already knew: I like ale over beer, and English/Scottish ales are my favorite, except for IPAs. I think it’s the sweeter, less hoppy ales that I most gravitate toward. I also find that I really enjoy Christmas and winter ales. They’re typically a bit heavier in some ways, sometimes with some Christmas-like spices added, but just are fun to drink.

And, even though I was done, I had a beer after ending my year of beer, and I couldn’t help take a photo of it. I did use a different lens, though, as a transition away from the 2009ish Lensbeer Project.

2010 will now be the year of my own ales. I’m starting in late January, so look for some entries on brewing from a new brewer coming soon!