Being a busy photography studio means that sometimes it hard to update our shop window! Which is why we thought we would share our biggest photography portfolio update in two years, and thought a quick blog post to mark this and highlight a few shots that newly adorn our site would be fun. It’s amazing just how many photographs we have made in the last two years, some shots always stand out and were shortlisted for inclusion in the portfolio straight away. However we have scanned back through dozens of projects from the last few years (no small job!) to pick out some fresh content to show off across all four of our portfolio’s for Product, Lifestyle, Property and Food Photography.
Some of our images cross over genres, often the line between product and lifestyle is blurred and the same can be said of product/food and lifestyle/property. Generally we place the shots based on their initial intention.
Product – Elliot Brown Holton
We love this shot, the dark stones compliment the military styling of this watch and yet allows the face and design details to stand out. Backgrounds like this can be risky, lots of small detail can overwhelm the viewers eyes and take away from the product or subject. Something we try to avoid. Here however everything is dark/tonally similar and not overly contrasty over the entire image. We lit the watch to stand out from its dark backdrop whilst remaining dark and true to its matte texture on the case and face. We also added a little sheen on the glass adds to the look. Head over to Elliot Browns website here!

Photography Portfolio Update: Lifestyle – Neal’s Yard WRBB
This beauty shot was made as part of a big promotional campaign for Neal’s yard and their popular Wild Rose Beauty Balm product. Shots like this may seem simple on the face of it (sorry), but the reality is there are a whole team of people needed to properly realise an image like this. In this case we saw the brief and some visuals before hand so we could be fully prepared and pre-light on the day of the shoot. Once the client arrives we double check the brief and plan our time. The models arrives along with hair and makeup and it all comes together. In the case of this shot the brief was very natural, as you would look when applying the product but it’s also representative on NY’s brand values.

Photography Portfolio Update: Food – Chocolate
This one was exciting, we were commissioned to shoot something for a magazine and there was no brief! We happened to be in a florists the week before the shoot picking up some greenery for props and they have a posh chocolate counter… That was enough to spark the idea so we went with it. We borrowed a lovely piece of black marble with gold veining running through it. You can see the veining in the foreground, it just adds something without over powering the shot. The devil is in the detail! After some initial shots we decided it needed something to soften it, we had planned to use some silky ribbon so looked at a few options but ended up with this wide slightly rougher hessian piece. The size, tone and texture all worked well so we ran with it, again not adding too much. We selected our final chocolates to make the tower, before placing some carefully in the background and finally adding the savings on the base. A dark brown background with tight spot completes the look. These shots are all about trying things, materials, amount of product (foreground and background), amount of focus or blur, the shape of the background light, how light it is or isn’t. It’s all part of the creative process that we love. P.s. we ate the chocolates!

Property – Sandbanks Living room
We had the privilege of shooting this property in Sandbanks, there’s so much going on in this shot of the main living room. Firstly the space is lovely, open and bright with all of the windows. The light un-fussy interior really complements this, and then there’s that view of Poole Harbour! As you can see it was a lovely sunny day on the South Coast and we believe there was a boating event on nearby so lots of people were out on their boats. This was really unusual and we felt it really added to the shot, showing off the lifestyle of the ares. We also intentionally kept the doors in shot on the left and right, leads your eye in nicely. We didn’t add any lighting to this, we simply bracketed the shot to bring the exposure on the room up against the outside scene to balance the image.

Take a look through the rest of our portfolio’s using the links on the top right of this page.
Thanks for reading and looking!