Ben Warde was enjoying a photo walk with colleagues not long ago, when he found himself pulled into the bar of San Francisco’s Basque Hotel. Many photo walks end in bars, the Adobe Lightroom product manager admits, and quickly he found himself nursing a Sazerac — an intoxicating cognac cocktail. Naturally, he snapped a picture, but the result was a little flat and dark. As he savored his drink, he pulled a few Lightroom sliders and saved his settings as a preset. “I just wanted to bring up a little contrast and drama,” he says. “I wanted the photo to have that same luminous quality of the drink.”
Try the preset yourself on a cocktail, or even something else. “If it happens to work well with other subjects,” he adds, “then that’s just serendipity.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ben Warde is a product manager at Adobe, working on the Lightroom team. He has a BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he studied film and photography. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, daughter, and a retired racing greyhound.
