Slick & Quick: Systemising E-commerce product photography

They say if you can cut the production time you can cut costs.

Setting up rigs to precisely control the lighting on reflective products like jewellery and wine bottles takes a little time, especially so when the best results are only achieved with custom built light shapers.

We have built dedicated rigs for those essential product shots that we are especially known for. Whilst we still manipulate the lighting to best suit each shot, the bones of out set up are already in place.

It keeps us competitive with pricing and delivers our clients high quality images for their marketing that sets them apart from their competition.

Tell 'em They're Dreaming! How we transformed empty offices into designer bedrooms

When Dreamland bedding approached us and Bianca Smith from biancasmith.com.au to create new images of their bedroom furniture range, the first logistical issue was finding a location to shoot the range that was close to their warehouse and easily accessible as the pieces were substantial and required assembly on site.

It just so happened that an adjoining office space next to their warehouse had just become vacant so with some vision and the extraordinary styling prowess of Bianca we were able to bring a homely feel to a corporate space.

We turned this..

into these..

When you have been working on a studio for a number of decades you are accustomed to starting with a blank canvas and building a perception. You prop and style for the camera angle and the crop.

Add to that our ability to enhance and manipulate the images in Photoshop we are able to achieve very realistic results within tighter budgets than we worked with 20 years ago.

The hands on approach - A morning with Marcello - Brini Estate McLaren Vale

Brini-022.jpg

A short time ago I was invited up to meet Marcello (Marsh) Brini who has a small estate vineyard in the higher altitude sub region of Blewitt Springs in McLaren Vale. This is a wonderful part of McLaren Vale, it’s cooler with a unique soil structure around ironstone outcrops so establishing a vineyard would have been quite a feat for his father Sebastiano when he arrived in 1950. This terroir attributes to the elegance and concentration of the wines, with a highlight for me being the bush grown Grenache. But then again, McLaren Vale Grenache is a bit of a fave of mine…

I like to mix up my approach by using a macro lens to draw attention to the more basic elements of the vineyard. Below you can see the vibrant pinks, reds and ochres in the exposed ironstone which is unique to this part of the Vales.

Marcello has a collection of tractors, some almost museum pieces, that have traversed the undulating vineyard for decades. He himself works tirelessly and on the day I visited he could hardly stop to pose for a shot. Or maybe he was just avoiding me…

I couldn’t help but admire his dedication to this patch of land that his family established 70 years earlier; it is a tiny jewel amongst some of the larger players in the region. There was no glamour, it was just bloody hard work. His wines are a true expression of the place, and his understanding of the terroir and it’s nuances have been a generational education.

As I left, as is so typical of the wonderful family generosity of the Italian culture, he plucked out a dozen mixed wines and sent me on my way. Salute!

The wine industry is a particular interest of mine, it has been for many years.

I visited Marcello on two occasions a few months apart and this is just a selection of the images I captured. A shoot of this nature only takes a few hours and can yield a strong suite of images that convey the story of the place (terroir) and its people which gives the consumer a more personal insight into the business. This is visual content that can be used across all marketing media applications.