Classic Drinks with Roberto Pellegrini

If working with drinks at the studio is enjoyable photography handcraft, working with the legendary Italian bartender Roberto Pellegrini is a great honor.

Here’s a selection from the series we shot working together over a couple of days at the studio. I feel like my photography friendly met his talent and style in mixing classic drinks.

Roberto’s impressive experience brings in authentic stories behind every drink. Also worth mentioning that working with him there’s no fake ice or tea replacing whiskey, all you see is real, made from scratch and absolutely authentic. Enjoy!

When Roberto initially told me about his style and how he is devoted to authenticity, I embraced the challenge of shooting all the cocktails on our list totally for real. As we all know, beverage photography typically uses fake ice and other tricks like coloring liquids and plastic decorations to have the drink perfectly changeless for all the time needed for lighting and the actual shoot.

Although the ‘fake’ approach is perfectly fine, we wanted to preserve rather than recreate that natural and unpredictable touch to our drinks so we went down the road of authenticity and it worked out awesome. Pre-lighting my set on testing
glass and then shooting real drinks allowed our workflows to combine flawlessly and we accomplished our goal even earlier than expected.