Friend of mine told me about article in foodesigns.com e-magazine where ice cubes where made from transparent candle gel. So I went to local craft shop and bought small pot of candle gel (cost was something like 9 euros). Here is what I did to get these artificial ice cubes shown on photos in this post.

• I poured melted gel to rectangular shaped vase about 1 inch thick
• Waited until the gel was firm again. Then I did take the gel “block” out from the vase and cut it nice cubes
• After that the fun part begin (and most dangerous one). I removed little bit gel from edges of the cubes (make more realistic looking cubes). Then I took candle to melt the edges carefully (remember that gel is used for candles so it will burn quite easily. So be extra careful on this part if you try to do fake ice cubes). You can easily mold cubes any shape you like with heat source.
• Result was realistic looking fake ice-cubes which does not melt in room temperature .

Just cubes in the glass:

And the whisky (coke with water) on the rocks:

I think the result is quite nice and these cubes were great to work with. Next time I had to try it with soda and other liquids. The lightning setup was similar to first attempt to photograph ice and whiskey.

• Single malt whiskey
• Heavy duty glass (bought cheap one)
• Clear ice cubes
• Camera and lightning props

Expected results:

A drunken photographer? Maybe, lets see what happens…

Setup:

Making the clear ice cube: If you want clear ice-cubes you need use distilled water and boil it twice (boil the water, let it calm down and boil again) and freeze them slowly. I did not have the distilled water so I tried do with tap water.

You can also use use artificial ice-cubes manufactured by Trengove Studios or similar cubes from other companies like Condor Foto (ice melts really fast, it is easier to work with artificial ice).

The key light (60cm soft box) was located behind black paper (gobo) which had 25×15cm hole in it. The glass is put on the small black tube to make isolation on photoshop easier. The amount of the black on the edge of glass can be controlled by moving glass forward to key light direction.

The fill light was located right side of the camera (angle of 45 degrees) to get nice reflection to left side of glass and correct color to whiskey. To get correct color I used yellow filter about 20×30cm with 50x 50 cm “frost paper”.

Here is my lightning setup diagrams:

Top view:

Front view (camera side):

Results:

Results were not good as I wanted them to be. I made few mistakes during the shoot and preparation. The tap water I used for ice cubes did not make them clear enough even with boiling the water twice. The ice was clearer than usually, but not clear enough to get really nice looking ice. I will use artificial ice next time to get more professional looking image. Other problem was the frost occurred on the glass which did not look nice (it would look nice on the beer bottle but not in the whiskey glass). Other mistake was to use cheap whiskey glass. The low-quality glass have tiny scratches and defects all over so this means lot of photoshop work afterwards.

First image without ice cubes:

and the second one with the cubes:

Conclusions:

• Home made ice cubes are not clear enough if made from tap water (not sure if clear enough even made from distilled water).
• Use only high quality (crystal) glass to avoid excessive use Photoshop. Cheap glass has many defects and tiny scratches all over it. High quality crystal glass does not seem to have these problems.
• Lightning filter (gel) needs to be used to get correct color on the whiskey.
• Artificial ice cubes will be used next time (real ice melts too fast and changes liquid outlook and it makes unwanted frost on the glass)
• Whiskey tasted good