Red Wine Makes Good Blood…

I made this image at the end of a long lunch — the kind where conversation lingers long after the plates are cleared, and the table becomes less of a place to eat and more a canvas of what just happened. The residue of red wine had bled into the paper surface, leaving behind those familiar circular stains — not accidental, not staged, just there. And I leaned in, glass still in hand, and shot.

Technically, this is an exercise in distortion and proximity. I used a wide lens, close focus, and a shallow depth of field. The resulting visual field is warped, but purposefully. You can see the sweep of glass across the foreground — soft, almost smeared — while the wine rings stay sharp and commanding at the centre. They’re the real subject. The rest just revolves around them.

Exposure was tricky. The ambient light was mixed: warm from the table surface, cool from the glasses and reflections. I didn’t try to neutralise it. Instead, I embraced the clash. The whites are dirty, the shadows unpredictable. But this tension, this chromatic messiness, gives the image a tactile realism. It feels like a moment frozen just before the cleanup.

The composition is asymmetric, almost aggressively so. Objects are cut, balance is denied. But the circles of wine — echoing each other — offer an accidental order. Like fingerprints or ritual marks. They speak of time passed. Of conversation. Of presence.

What I like is that nothing about this is elegant. It’s mundane. But it holds weight — a residue of human trace. That, for me, is often enough.