I absolutely love the opportunity to work with other creative business owners. It’s an honor to get to know other “artsy-fartsy,” as my Mom used call me, people who are excited and passionate about getting their art out into the world. Lulu and Buni specializes in clay dishes perfect for trinkets and jewelry. Designed, crafted and shipped from a mother daughter team!
The Challenge
These business owners found me through a good old fashioned Google search and when they inquired they shared that they were interested in getting photos taken of their best-selling birth month dishes in a “natural, colorful and bright” way. Even more ideally, they wanted to be able to utilize live versions of the different kinds of flowers that are portrayed on each individual month’s dish as the supporting props in the photos. The needed cohesive images that would help give their Etsy storefront the clean, bright and consistent look they were going for and they wanted to be able to use images in their social media feeds as well.
We started by crafting a timeline for the 12 individual dishes, creating a list of the flowers we needed to source and the small props we wanted to use as supporting elements. Due to the small size of these dishes, I knew that each scene would need to be styled in a compact way that portrayed the dish as the hero in each photo, but still left room for the colorful flowers and props that would give a sense of place and to help show their target audience how these dishes could be used.
The next step was actually sourcing the flowers! This session took place in March and due to the VERY cold winter and late spring we had in the Pacific Northwest this year, many of the flowers we needed were not locally available. Luckily, due to my many years in the wedding industry, I had a connection with an amazing local florist, A New Leaf Florist Shoppe, who was able to help us find the flowers we needed.
From there it was a matter of deciding on the best background to use in conjunction with the dishes and supporting props and getting everything to my studio. Since this business is not local to Bellingham, the items were shipped to me and we were off to the races!
The Project
The day before our scheduled session date, I popped down to the flower shop and picked up the fresh flowers so I could have them ready for! The morning of our session I got the studio all set up with the crisp, white, marbled background we had decided on, my trusty Godox flash setup and a 100mm macro lens – PERFECT for this smaller kind of product work! I laid out each flower type in order by month along with the corresponding dish and got started in January.
The total session time was 3 hours – 15 minutes per dish. Again, because of the small size of these dishes and thanks to the epic 100mm macro lens, the scenes really didn’t need to be larger than an 8X10 size giving me flexibility in getting different angles without over-styling the space and wasting time. See below for a few behind the scenes shots of what the studio looked like!
The goal for each scene was to get a top down, 45 degree and macro shot of every dish. We needed shots of the entire dish as well as some varying detail shots of the unique edges and engravings of the dishes for social media, too. In the end, the client would up with 144 images, 12 photos per dish!
The Takeaway
Upon delivery of the digital gallery, included in all of my sessions, the client called me to report her utter delight. She was so pleased with the final results and how well I was able to capture the dishes in the bright, natural, colorful way they’d been hoping for and she couldn’t wait to get them up in her shop. Since then, you can now find these photos on their Etsy shop page and can see the cohesive look it gives their birth month dish collection for yourself!
Want to see some other examples of products photographed in my studio? Be sure to check out Happy Hippie Granola, Trove Cannabis and Herbcrafter’s Tarot!
Want to work together to photograph YOUR product in a unique way!? Contact me today to get started!
