This is a project that took a long time in preparation. Meetings after meetings. But alhamdulillah, we achieved excellent result on the shooting day as everything had initially been made as clear as possible.
Entity: Silver Spoon Premium Patisserie
Output:
– Product Catalog
– Social Media content
Number of items: 15, 2-3 frames each, following a moodboard
Style: soft, classy, elegant, clean, rustic
Lighting: all natural
Duration: 1 working days (8 hours)
The overall workflow was similar with my Bulk Scenario. But this was easier with much much less number of items and the major help of a mood board.
MOOD BOARD
I feel like using this all of my life 🙂 Finally I met an art director who cares enough to meticulously prepare samples of photos that we would take on the shooting day. We went through every item one by one, discussed it together with the whole team to determine style, number of frames, angles, compositions, colors, lighting, everything. Ultimately we achieved an agreed mood board that would be our guidance on the d-day.
The only thing I would do differently was that I would have printed the mood board in giant size for us to check together as the session went, so we don’t have to go back and fort checking laptop and our gadgets. But nonetheless, we finished the session on time while maintaining our sanity 😀 And, of course, went home with delicious, debatably healthy, desserts of the century.
PRODUCTS
When the food needs to be photographed as products as well, for catalog, not only for promotion material that is more editorial in nature, you need to prepare at least 2-4 units for each product. For example, Strawberry Shortcake. The chef or the kitchen team needs to prepare 4 identical Strawberry Shortcakes:
- 1 cake for whole cake photo
- 1 cake to be sliced
- 1 cake to be drizzled with strawberry sauce or jam
- 1 cake as a spare, in case something goes wrong
This unit number varies from 2-5 per item depending on your planned shots. Do not forget that simple dessert like brownies would be more appealing with sugar dusting action shot, which of course will need one more unit to prepare. You can always ask the team to spare extra cake but the owner would also consider budget efficiency. So plan thoroughly, as accurately as you can.
GEAR
- For flat lay:
5DMKII + 24-70mm f/4 L + Manfrotto MT055XPRO3 - For normal angle:
5DMKIII + 100 mm f/2.8 L macro + Standard tripod - A very good food stylist 🙂
That would be all for now. I hope this can be useful to anyone. For the next post, I probably would share my recent experience of teaching a group of senior citizens how to photograph food with any given gadget. See you around, insyaAllah.
Salaam,
Riana