Thanks @rt395 for the thoughtful comment ;)
These pictures were taken for a specialised magazine so I consciously avoided taking anything too arty: the readers of the magazine have a good knowledge of the spirits world so they want good clear shots of what the distillery actually looks like, not distorted by my attempts to be an artist! Also, I personally don't like photos distorted by quirks of the lens so I usually correct the perspective in Photoshop to get a more balanced final image. The rest I guess is just marketing: trying to get some nice clean shots of the company logo in a good percentage of the photos, and a certain degree of sharpness in the overall image (most photos I took were reused many times in many different ways, sometimes cropped down to a single detail). All of that probably comes out in all my photos, even those I take for myself and which have nothing to do with my former work. And as for positioning, in warehouses and distilleries like these, it was often a simple case of wherever I could put the tripod (not much light in most of these old buildings)! I also had to work fast most of the time: while I was shooting, a colleague was following the team around asking questions, taking samples and writing notes and if I got left too far behind it would be difficult to take pictures that would correspond to the content of the article. My job was to illustrate the article, not write it, after all. Which was a nice constraint to have. But it did sometimes mean that I didn't get to take the photos I would have liked to, especially when the distillery was not very pretty (many of them are just factories, after all)!
Interesting. Did you scrap a majority of the pictures you took or did you get them right the first time? I am just trying to figure out why 80% of the time my pictures don't catch the essence of things. Thanks.
Yeah, I do that. Not enough time to get everything perfect the first time. Plus, too many variations in lighting etc. Not to mention the fact that a barrel moves a damn sight less than the average human being ;)