Interview: Photographer Dave Ma on Creating Ballantine's 'Artist Series' Whisky Bottles

Interview: Photographer Dave Ma on Creating Ballantine's 'Artist Series' Whisky Bottles

Ballantines
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Image via Ballantine's

Ballantines

For the second instalment in their annual ‘Artist Series’, Ballantine’s (the world’s No 2 Scotch whisky) have teamed up music video director and photographer Dave Ma to design a series of limited edition bottles and tins for brand’s Finest and 12 Year Old blends. Ma, who has worked with the likes of Foals, A$AP Rocky, Diplo, Skrillex, Bastille and Rudimental, shot a series of images at 8,000 feet above the Scottish Highlands, where the whisky is made. He then manipulated those images digitally, to create the cool, distinctive designs that now cover the Ballantine’s gift packs. We went up to the Scotland, to visit the Ballantine’s distillery, and spoke to Ma about what inspiration he got from the Highlands, and the adrenaline rush you get from hanging out of a helicopter taking photos. 

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How did the collaborative with Ballantine’s come about?

They approached me, saying they like what I do, and they were looking to do with someone who works with a lot of artists and bands. And then the conversation turned to these aerial shots that I’d been doing. I was on planes a lot of the time {flying to video shoots}, and I’d look out of the window and think it was incredible. I had a zoom lens in my bag, so I started photographing it. And then I started messing around with the colours. I was also obsessed with Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, so the first ones I was doing were desert-scapes, pushing those hot orange colours — I loved how it felt like it was from another world. And then the conversation progressed from there. Then I suppose the other side was like when I work with musicians: I’d meet them and I’d be interested in the backstory — where do they come from, what goes into the music they make. So I was drawing that parallel, coming up to Scotland and seeing where Ballantine’s is from, and what goes into it.

Was this your first time in Highlands?

Yeah. The Scottish Highlands was always this enigma that you’d hear about, and everyone raves about after they’ve been there, but you don’t have a massive context for it. And then to see it from a helicopter, it was pretty mindblowing.

Did you have any preconceptions about the Scottish Highlands that were either met or proved wrong?

It was one of the few times where I didn’t overly research where I was going, because I knew part of it was just going to experience it for the first time. Normally I do loads of research, but here it was just going along for the ride and seeing how I responded. If anything I underestimated the variety of the landscape and how epic it would be.

You're from Australia, which is a massive country with lots of open space that you can get lost and isolated in. The Scottish Highlands are about the only place like that in the UK. Did they remind you of Australia in that sense?

It’s interesting you mention the isolation thing. It’s something iInoticed when I was living in England for ten years, that unlike Australia you never get away from anywhere. You’re always two fields away from a village. And thats a weird concept for me, because you could drive from Sydney to Perth and be in the middle of nowhere. Straight road, and the only thing is a petrol station every 300km. You don’t that have that in most of the UK. But it was interesting to come to the Highlands and find that there aren’t even roads going to a lot of places, and you have to hike it.

What was it like hanging out of a helicopter taking photos at 10,000 ft? Was it scary?

Kind of surreal and exhilarating. It wasn’t scary. I was maybe a little apprehensive before going up because I hadn’t sat on the edge of an open door of a helicopter before! But once I was up there, there was literally none of that. I was working, I was focused on all the places I wanted to get to or the angles I wanted to get. Immediately that adrenaline kicks in, and you get on with it. But I did have a few moments in the middle where I had to just stop, take it in and enjoy it. 

It was all shot on digital, but did you try shooting anything on film while you were up there?

With that whole surreal colour thing, immediately I thought it would be interesting to explore infra-red. But quickly it became obviously on a few test rolls that it was so cold, and the temperature was so low that film was just not reacting in any vibrant way, and that it would be a lot better to do it digitally. 

What sort of digital manipulation did you use to create the final images?

Without wanting pulling back the curtain too much, I used a lot of it is filters, a lot of it is a white balance thing that I would do on a lot of other photos to create cooler colour tones. That’s another thing — green’s not one of my favourite colours, so to pull greens into a different place is always a first step for me. And then after that t’s isolating different colours and pushing them into different places. I’ve always loved the way the technicolour process works where it pulls similar colours into a singular colour-space, and then you create much more bold juxtapositions between the colours. There are little tie-ins to the whisky, but at the end of the day, it’s more about what’s a cool, stunning image. 

Ballantines

The 2016 Ballantine’s Artist Series Limited Edition gift packs are available globally from October 2016. Stockist: Finest Tin, 12 Year Old Tin.

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