Neon Nights: Shooting a Celebrity Energy-Drink Campaign

Behind a high-energy music and celebrity campaign for Bamboo energy drink in Bogotá — neon light, movement and the challenge of photographing a performer as a brand.

An energy drink is all promise — the promise of a bigger night, more movement, more life. Building a campaign around one, especially with a well-known musical artist at the centre, means photographing that promise directly: light, motion, and the electric feeling of a night at its peak. This one, for Bamboo, was shot in Bogotá in a wash of neon, and it moves.

Celebrity and entertainment campaigns are a distinct discipline. The public already has a relationship with the face in front of your lens, and your job is to serve both the person and the brand without letting either flatten the other.

Lighting for energy

The whole look was built from coloured light — hot orange against electric teal, hard neon, the glow of a bar sign in an alley. Colour like that reads instantly as nightlife and youth, and it lets you shoot movement without needing everything sharp and clean. A little blur, a little flare, and the frame feels like the night rather than a document of it.

It is the same tool I reach for on cinematic work like Entre Hombres, just pointed at a completely different emotion. There, red and blue meant dread; here, the same idea of two-colour lighting means euphoria. The technique is identical; the feeling is the opposite. That is the fun of understanding light as a language.

Photographing a performer

Working with an artist who performs for a living is a gift, because they understand the camera instinctively — they know how to give energy, how to move, how to hit a moment. The trick is to build a set loose enough that real performance can happen, then be fast enough to catch it. You are not posing a musician; you are catching one mid-flow.

Around the star, the crowd matters just as much. A celebrity campaign lives or dies on whether the world around the artist feels genuinely alive, so I gave as much attention to the dancers and the DJ and the friends in the neon as to the headline face. The energy has to be believable at every edge of the frame.

“You don't pose a performer. You build the moment and you're ready when they light it up.”

The product in the party

Somewhere in all that motion, the product still has to sell. The discipline of beverage advertising — which I bring to everything from Cerveza Andina to this — is to make the can or bottle feel discovered, not displayed. A drink catching the neon on a bar, a hand raising it mid-dance: present but never posed. If the audience notices the product before they notice the feeling, you have lost.

So the Bamboo can appears the way it would on a real night out — in someone's hand, glowing under the lights, part of the party rather than an ad interrupting it.

Why celebrity work is worth the pressure

Entertainment and celebrity campaigns come with more pressure — bigger audiences, tighter schedules, more stakeholders — but they are some of the most rewarding shoots there are. A single strong image can travel across a whole country's social feeds in a day. And the skills they demand, reading a performer, controlling light, building energy, sharpen everything else I do. They led directly to sessions like Lewis Hamilton for Target in Miami and the JBL portraits in Brooklyn.

These are some of the frames from that neon night in Bogotá: the movement, the colour, and the particular high-voltage joy of a campaign built to feel like the best hour of the best night out.