A Spirited Business // Tallahassee Magazine

A Spirited Business // Tallahassee Magazine

Tallahassee Magazine assigned us to photograph a feature on Ology Brewing Company for their May/June 2021 issue. The story, written by Bob Ferrante, covered Ology's expansion from craft beer and coffee into distilled spirits, and the assignment took us to their facility off Powermill Court in Tallahassee to capture photographs of the team, the distilling process, and the products themselves.

Brewery and distillery photography is one of those assignments where you're balancing people, products, and space all in the same session. Ology's facility has a lot of visual interest; there's stainless steel equipment, bottles on shelves, the distilling setup, and the taproom and beer garden that regulars already know well. The challenge is making all of those elements feel cohesive in a magazine spread rather than like a disconnected collection of detail images. You need portraits of the people behind the product, close-ups of the bottles and the process, and wider compositions that give the reader a sense of the space.

For the product photography, we used Profoto lighting to give us control over how the bottles and glassware looked. Photographing glass and liquid is tricky because you're dealing with reflections, transparency, and the way light passes through different colors of spirit. A bottle of clear vodka behaves completely differently under lights than a bottle of rum, and getting both to look good in the same visual language takes some attention to how you position and modify the light. We also photographed portraits of lead distiller Jason Grant and members of the Ology team in and around the production space, using the equipment and environment as the backdrop rather than pulling them out of context.

As Tallahassee photographers, we've watched the local craft beverage scene grow over the last several years, and Ology has been a big part of that. We've photographed their space for other assignments as well, including the 10 Places to Chill feature we did for INFLUENCE Magazine. Having that familiarity with the location and the team helps when you're working on a tight editorial timeline because you already know the layout, the light, and the spots that photograph well.

This kind of editorial photography sits at the intersection of food and beverage, portrait, and commercial work. It's one of the areas where photography in Tallahassee has a lot of room to grow, and features like this in Tallahassee Magazine help put the local scene on the map for readers across the region.

This feature was photographed by The Workmans for Tallahassee Magazine and appeared in the May/June 2021 issue and was written by Bob Ferrante. The Workmans are a husband-and-wife photography team based in Tallahassee, Florida, and we work with publications across the state of Florida, in Washington D.C. and around the United States. You can explore more of our editorial photography in the archive, see more of our work across our website and connect with us on how we can best serve you!