Ideas are dangerous things - pouring 150 litres of wine over a friend

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Ideas are dangerous things. For example “what would happened if I poured copious amounts of wine over a person?”

This was probably the most fun I’ve ever had on a shoot. Once someone has allowed themselves to be utterly covered in a substance then the ideas just keep flowing. How many different ways are there to pour wine over a friend? Let’s try them all and see what looks good.

The idea first crossed my mind after photographing a wine journalist a little while back and as great ideas do it got stuck. Pictures kept appearing in my head of what it might look like. I ended up having to find a way to make the shoot happen.

Thankfully my friend Nik is rather into wine. In fact he loves his wine so much he started his own wine business called Red Squirrel Wines. So I asked Nik if I could pour 150 litres of wine over him and got a single word email in response: “Yes!”

Of course I then had to figure out how to make it happen. It is not easy to get that amount of liquid all dropping on a single person and being able to control it enough to capture a photo. However, many hours sat in front of google can solve all of life's problems it seems - it can even acquire you 150 litres of wine to photograph and a barrel to pour it from. So we had a date and we had the wine and the kind people at Machine Shop had supplied us with a device to pour it from.

The shoot was hilarious and wonderful. Nik was brilliant in front of the camera: he had plenty of ideas and didn’t mind having to shower every 15 minutes only for his identical outfit to be soaked yet again.

Anyone else want me to pour stuff all over them?


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Here's a little video of the madness from my instagram:
A video posted by Charlie Clift (@charlie_clift) on

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