Shooting glass is no easy task. You’re not just dealing with the subject itself—you’re sparring with its reflections. The glass throws back every bit of light, the camera, even your own face. You can’t just aim some soft light at a bottle and expect magic. You have to shape the scene around the glass, control what it picks up. Sometimes, you backlight it through a scrim, blocking out every other shiny distraction in the room. And as for dust—well, every single speck jumps out at you, especially on dark glass. Seems like you wipe it clean, set up your lighting, check your angle, and by the time you’re ready, there’s already a fresh smudge or fleck of dust. It starts to feel like you’re doing just as much erasing as adding. You spend most of your time figuring out what not to let the glass see.

I'd decided to focus on food photography that semester in my studio and commercial classes. It wasn't required; I had just taken an interest in that. So with the glass assignment, I wanted to tie in food too, or at least something food-adjacent.

To be honest, what I actually wanted to photograph was Chartreuse. I love anything to do with the Carthusians, and I love that particular green of the liqueur, which is made by monks at the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps using a recipe of 130 different herbs and other botanicals that only two of them know at any given time. But Chartreuse is hard to find on a student budget, and it's not something you pick up on a whim at the corner store. So I went with what I could get: a bottle of Chimay, also made by monks, also glass with a label that had some weight and history to it.

I must've shot fifty frames over an hour of this one bottle trying to nail the shot. I was thinking about the highlight wrapping the shoulder, and whether the label would blow out or hold detail. I wasn't thinking about the beer inside really, or doing anything with the photos beyond completing the assignment.

I turned in the project for class and that was that. Then it sat on my hard drive for almost ten years.

The reward

I unearthed that old photo recently and decided to have some fun with it. Built a spec ad from scratch. I dropped the bottle into a stock image of a wine cellar—rows of barrels fading into shadow—and tweaked the color until everything meshed. The tagline came quickly: Patience is a virtue. Chimay is the reward.

What I love about the Trappists is the same thing I love about the slow food world in general — dedication to the craft, the refusal to rush, the willingness to keep doing the thing carefully for as long as it takes. The monks at Scourmont have been brewing since 1862. They make what they need to sustain the monastery, and then they stop. The beer isn't the point. The monastery, the life and the vocation of the monks is. But they've insisted, for over 160 years, on supporting that life by making something well — because the work is at the service of the vocation.

There was a small satisfaction in seeing the old photograph find its home — the image I took of one bottle, on a wood stool I'd brought into the studio from home, now hanging out in a dark, moody cellar courtesy of Eric Cook on Unsplash.

If any of this hits home, and you’re also out there making something slow and careful, or finding inspiration from a project you worked on years ago — drop me a line. I'd love to hear about it.