cibusphoto

Colour decides who you are talking to

A Sicilian winery. Between 2023 and 2024, several commissions: the catalogue still lifes, the wines and the owners photographed in the cellar, and images for social.

Project
Brugnano Wines
Year
2023–2024
The Naisi bottle on a pale grey ground, the hard shadow of a window and a glass of red

The brief

Not one job but a run of them. It started with still life for the catalogue: the shots on white, the ones a price list and an e-commerce page need, and alongside them the creative images, the ones that open a section and end up in advertising. Then the other commissions followed — the wines and the owners photographed in the cellar, and the social images — and each time meant stepping back into a visual world already under way.

The constraint

Inside the same catalogue there are wines that are not speaking to the same person. There is the V90 line, aimed at a young audience, and there are more complex labels addressed to people who have been drinking wine for longer. Those are two opposite ways of being looked at: one has to be seen from across a room, among a thousand other things, and stop the eye in a tenth of a second; the other wants to be looked at closely and slowly, and if it raises its voice it disqualifies itself. So the photography is asked to do two contrary jobs — and then both halves land in the same catalogue and on the same website, under the same brand. If they look like they came from two different suppliers, the catalogue splits down the middle.

How we solved it

On the line aimed at the young audience we decided to go all the way: full colour, blocks of it cutting across the frame, hard shadows like overhead sun, and the props painted in the same shade as the ground — a field of pink bottles around one real bottle, blue sand, yellow against blue. The set becomes a colour field and the bottle is left as the only object inside it with depth: that is why the eye lands on it, and lands from a distance. On the other half you do exactly the opposite, and it takes more discipline: one wall, a block of tufa stone, the shadow of a window, black on black with a single ellipse of light. What holds the two directions together is not the styling, it is the glass: in both, the real work is the same — giving the bottle volume without returning the set, keeping the label flat and legible, keeping the metallic inks alive without blowing them out, where a few degrees of tilt separate a highlight from a white patch. The brand mark has to read identically over a yellow field and inside a black one. In the cellar the register changes again: light kit to move through a working space, and a light that carves the stacked bottles rather than flattening them.

What we delivered

  • Still life on white, clippable, for the catalogue and e-commerce
  • Creative still life in two directions: full colour for the V90 line, a sober register for the more complex labels
  • Cellar shots: the wines among the stacks and the barrels
  • Portraits of the owners at work, with no posing
  • Scene images for social, in portrait format

Where the images ended up

  • Product catalogue
  • Website
  • Social
  • Advertising
  • Packshot of Ammaru Zibibbo on white, clipped, with its reflection

    The other half of the same commission is this: product isolated, clippable, with its own shadow. It is the file a price list, an e-commerce page and an importer's sell sheet need, and it must say nothing beyond the product.

  • Packshot of Coraline Frappato rosé on white, with its reflection
  • Packshot of Lunario Grillo Sicilia DOC on white, with its reflection
  • Packshot of Her Perricone on white, with its reflection
  • Victora sparkling rosé among pink-painted bottles, on a pink ground

    For the line aimed at a young audience we chose to go bold: ground and props painted the same colour, so the bottle is left as the only object with depth inside the colour field.

  • Vinovanta Grillo Sicilia DOC against blocks of yellow and blue, with a hard shadow
  • Coraline Frappato rosé lying on blue sand with two shells
  • Her Perricone on a block of tufa stone, mauve wall and window shadow
  • Black Hole Nerello Mascalese, black on black, inside a single ellipse of light

    The other direction does the opposite, and it asks for more discipline: black on black, a single ellipse of light. The fewer things in the frame, the more each one weighs.

  • Taurus Bianco frizzante and a glass on a terracotta and dusty pink ground
  • Taurus Bianco lying on a deep blue ground, the gold of the label and a glass
  • Ammaru Zibibbo lying among the glasses, with the caustics of the glass on a pale ground
  • Alquimia Passito and slices of dried citrus on a white table, overhead sun
  • The Brugnano Metodo Classico on a barrel, in warm backlight
  • The owners in front of the stack of bottles lying on their sides

    In the cellar everything changes: light kit to move through a working space, and the owners photographed doing something rather than posed.

  • One owner lifts the bottle towards the light, the other watches
  • Portrait of the two owners in the cellar, beside the bottles
  • Wine drawn from the tap of tank number 15
  • The glass held up to the light in front of the steel tank
  • The tasting, in front of the steel tanks
  • A laid table with ice bucket, glasses and dishes: an image for social

    For social the job changes again: the bottle stops being an object and goes back inside a scene — a table, some ice, people. Portrait format, and readable in half a second.

  • Victora in the bucket packed with ice, condensation on the glass
  • At the table with the Alquimia and the small glasses, the sea behind

More work

Back to work

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