What to say? I don’t drink alcoholic anything, but here we are for a third time romping over Bud Light. Perhaps you know the once popular beer that undergoes the mother of all boycotts—after Anheuser-Busch made the marketing mistake of aligning with a transgender TikToker.
Previously, on this torrid topic: “‘Hey, I Thought There was a Boycott!‘” and “Delivering or Removing?” So with the beer’s sales flushing down a toilet, I was surprised to see—on Oct. 8, 2023—a bag of empties tied up nicely for someone like Pat to grab and cash in at the local recycler. The Featured Image was a compulsory capture, if for no other reason than how cleanly the cans were gathered together and neatly sacked.
The photo also demonstrates some of the benefits of shooting RAW, which I do with Leica Q2, and working with those files in post-production rather than JPEG. The cans were barely distinguishable inside the translucent-white bag. But tweaking in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom makes them pop: Cranking dehaze and selectively saturating blue. Vitals, aperture manually set: f/5.6, ISO 100, 1/60 sec, 28mm; 4:26 p.m. PDT.
Someone surely likes drinking Bud Light—boycott be damned. Who can it be now? That question, and title to this post, pays homage to the Men at Work song of the same name. On Oct. 30, 1982, the single reached No. 1 in the U.S. on the Billboard Hot 100.