Nature is weird, unexpected and inspirational if you only stare at it long enough.
Over the years beer, wine and other alcoholic beverages have started to show off some very marvelous and inventive labels. I've become inspired by some of these delightfully decorative designs that line so many store shelves. Spec shoots for products I find terribly interesting naturally follow, such as one highlighting Virtue Cider.
When thinking about how I could create a scene in which these lovely labels could naturally occur I was intrigued by the idea of a bottle surrounded by one of its ingredients such as a honey cider being found in a honeycomb.
“Its so organic the bees themselves brewed it!” my brain cries!
Could I have easily photoshopped the bottle within a still frame of a perfect and pristine honeycomb? Yes, but where's the fun in that?
I would rather see the beautiful imperfections of these industrious insects and view firsthand their handiwork and natural building skills. In contemporary imagery (looking at you social media) I feel like perfection is expected out of every aspect of our world. And not only is this exhausting on many levels for us it also gives an unrealistic expectation of the world. I would rather see and create the intricate flaws in a natural work than to see the perfect product after its diligent digital construction.
Luckily I was introduced to a Chicago park system beekeeper (everybody needs a bee guy) and was delighted to hear from him confidently inform me we could place a bottle of cider within the hive and get the bees to build around the bottle. He did warn though, that often if a colony thinks a foreign object is a danger to the hive they may choose to encase the thing in question in a bee's version of concrete and not in the graceful honeycombs we know and love. So this was either going to be a Frank Lloyd Wright or an underground bunker, I was willing to take my chances with my non negotiable construction crew.
After a few conversations with him educating me on the charming intricacies of bee life, I was delighted to discover he had been working with a colony to make them comfortable around humans with his continual presence around their hive. By regularly checking in on them and demonstrating he was no real threat, he was able to walk right up to this hive without any protective gear (nor any smoke), slide the lid off and inspect what they had going on under the hood. I was in awe of this relationship of trust he had built in the colony. They flew around him without a care as he shifted frames to show me how exquisitely they had crafted their honeycombs. His goal was to have these calm colonies so that he could safely teach kids and adults alike about bees and bring them closer to nature.
He was able to find me a beeswax frame with a foundation of empty combs which he carefully wired the bottle into place within and dropped into the active hive.
Weeks passed and when I returned to check in on the process I had been informed that our happy little bees had actually started stealing honey from other locations on the property and filling their hive with their ill begotten goods. The colony I had chosen to work with was an industrious bunch indeed! I was assured that this was a natural, if uncommon behavior he had seen. This painted a whole new picture for me of these tiny furry sugar thieves.
When it came time to take the frame out and inspect the bees' handiwork they had dutifully integrated my bottle into the honeycomb, filled the combs and created this delicate wavy landscape that pillowed the bottle gently in a sticky and sweet smelling bed. Because of all of the images of perfect and flat honeycombs I had seen in images over the course of my life I had never imagined they could have such variation and depth. I was impressed by these tiny insects of industry!
Setting up the shoot itself I knew that I wanted the image to show a workbench, possibly a table for prepping items from a garden. I also wanted to highlight not just the honey that made this beautiful cider but also the apples which were the base for the cider itself and decided to choose a yellow and pink variety to match the bottle label. The goal behind this image was to scream into the brain of the viewer "Honey cider, fresh from the apple orchard bee hive... LITERALLY".
Because the final image was created in a small studio space in no time the whole room was perfumed with the sticky smell of fresh honey. The fact that the honey flowed freely from the open honeycomb when turned on its side only helped the scent take over. It was a sticky mess, but well worth it!
Very little retouching was done to this image to preserve the organic and textured nature of the items I was working with, I simply removed the copper wire that had been holding the bottle in place to not distract from the bee’s construction.
These images I created are a nod to the imperfect beauty of nature and how it surprised me with its imprecise organic charm. This spec shoot not only gave me first hand experience of the surprises nature can throw at you, and also that bees, when given the opportunity, can be tiny fuzzy thieves.