Festive Duvel

Last week I made  couple of shots for Duvel as a lead up to the arrival of Sinterklaas.
I wanted a nice looking traditional brick fireplace that wasn’t too dirty and ‘used’ I looked around for a few and someone suggested I look in showroom of Van Raemdonck They build all sorts of fireplaces and I found just the style I wanted there.  The problem was, the fireplace was new, and in fact wasn’t a wood burning fireplace at all. It was fitted with a modern bioethanol hearth.
I needed a real fire.  This was going to be an image made from several components.

To solve the first issue I first shot a real open fire in a cassette stove, carefully stacking the fire as I wanted it and making multiple shots to give myself choice of flame intensity. It was then a simple matter of taking that image to the fireplace showroom and matching my camera position and angle to match the fire. 🙂

Here’s the chosen image followed by a backup alternative that I made. 

Here’s the  chosen fire shot, made with no extra lighting.

Here are the base setup shots made in the fireplace showroom.
To add some warmth to the bricks at the back of the hearth I simply fired a Rosco gelled Nikon SB800 into there.

To add some light to the shoes and bottles I used a softboxed/gridded and gelled Dedolight DLED4.1

The SB800 was throwing too much light onto the front edge of the brick hearth so I made a stock image without firing the flash.
The final images had the fire blended in and the front bricks from this shot.

A snap of the setup. The first tries had the SB800 in the hearth but this was giving a very small light spread, even when zoomed to the widest angle. I moved the flash out of the hearth for the final shot.
The Dedolight is seen in position and to get the angle I wanted I hung the Nikon D810 under the tripod and shot tethered to Lightroom.

Job done.