Drinks – Chinaski Club — Nightlife Cocktail Photography
Drinks and bar photography at Chinaski Club in Frankfurt: cocktails at the bar. Cocktail photography at Chinaski in Frankfurt. The set shows the list in its own…
Cocktail photography at Chinaski in Frankfurt. The set shows the list in its own surroundings: a stemmed glass with dried orange peel against the bottle wall in bokeh, a row of long drinks on the pale counter in daylight, a glass in front of a green neon sign, the bottles they are built from, and the building's rubble-stone wall as a backdrop.
A bar needs these pictures for four different purposes, and those decide the crop. The menu wants the glass isolated and calm. The Instagram feed wants verticals, because everything else gets cut there. Google and the delivery platforms want squares. And the website wants the landscape frames with room around the glass for type to go later. Deliver one format only and you hand the client the job of cutting the rest of your composition away — so every subject is photographed in several aspect ratios rather than cropped afterwards.
The work happens in a working bar. That means one corner of the counter, usually in the afternoon, with the guest area left open. A set-up that takes half an hour is no set-up in a place like this. Two small lights, a dark board as a flag, and the rest is the house's own lighting.
That lighting is precisely why these pictures look like this bar rather than a studio shot with a cocktail in it. The green neon, the warm rubble-stone wall, the dark counter timber, the lights of the bottle shelf — no seamless backdrop supplies that, and a glass cut out on white would have said nothing about the place.
And one thing that has to be planned across a whole list: the colors. The drinks are red, amber, yellow and pink, and the room is brown and dark. To keep two neighboring pictures in a feed from carrying the same color, the order of the frames is decided in advance — otherwise the client ends up with twelve good pictures and no series.
- Bar
- Chinaski Club
