The Client and Their Brief
During the summer of 2022 we started making brilliant supplement & nutrition photography for a brand called Herbalife, through one of our lovely long term clients, Walker!
Being a global brand with a high quantity of products, we knew we’d have plenty to shoot! Over the course of this year we’ve created engaging content for new product launches for e-commerce, and Herbalife is a fantastic client to have on board because the minimalistic brand aesthetic complements our style of work.
It allows us to creatively demonstrate our product photography skills, both in studio and on location!
What We Did
The photoshoot consisted of 9 days, with a total of 88 shots! For this particular job, the brief required us to create images that were bright, vibrant, modern, clean and with soft diffused shadows. The backgrounds and surfaces were muted tones with different textures. The entire shoot was divided into 8 different product categories, each with different style choices, formats and camera angles. This really helped us to navigate through the brief efficiently, particularly in terms of lighting set ups.
The main challenge of this job was ensuring that every product on the list was shot, styled and propped in the correct manner. After all, consistency is key when identifying a brand’s signature look. The majority of this shoot involved Herbalife products blended into a drink (i.e protein shakes) rather than showing the outer product packaging. Therefore working with a food stylist was vital to convey the brand qualities of the items!
Clean lighting and contemporary coloured backdrops were key for the success of illustrating Herbalife’s brand image and healthy ethos. Our backdrop collection has become bigger over the years, which can be useful for campaigns like these which require specific textures and colours. However, often we’ll have to add to the collection and order in some new options. For example, the pastel mottled marble surfaces which were important throughout most of the shoot. Each shot required ingredients to illustrate the drink flavours. This is a styling technique that can often be time consuming to perfect! Multiple props can become messy and a distraction from the focal point. Therefore, wooden plinth blocks were the perfect prop to elevate and visually separate the products from the scattered ingredients.
Lighting has always been one of our strengths as commercial photographers. It’s a part of the creative process that we particularly enjoy and always strive to achieve the best possible outcome. However, it can be one of the trickiest aspect to perfect, especially with a large quantity of products and reflective glass – which is hotbed for reflections and light spots! We have to keep a good balance between perfection and working efficiently.
The most important part of shooting supplement & nutrition photography is to ensure the product and ingredients look fresh and appetising; our key job as commercial photographers, to make products look the best they can be! Keeping food and liquids cold can be tricky when exposed under hot lights in a studio. Small little tweaks such as replacing a strawberry with a fresher one, or adding ice so the glass looks more chilled can really enhance the images. Often we’ll use clear sheet acrylic with liquids or creams, to prevent moisture from affecting the set surfaces.. which our retouchers love as it’s much easier to remove in post-production! Shooting a variety of textures such as soft (fruits), liquids and hard textures (chunks of chocolate) can be challenging and time consuming, requiring lots of additional lighting to accentuate each texture. It’s these little tweaks that can massively improve the quality of the shots.
How It Looks
The Results
We throughly enjoyed shooting this Herbalife project, especially executing a range of concepts across the series, through lighting, complimentary coloured backdrops and varying perspectives. We enjoyed conveying different moods within each category, for example some stills were more evenly lit and had a fresher feel, whereas the H24 product range were shot on a dark grey concrete background, which had more of a rustic appearance and mood. The plinths created a great shape and formation and the botanicals helped to frame the shots, drawing attention towards the products.
We hope this gives you more of an insight into the techniques we use to shoot supplement & nutrition photography. It was a pleasure shooting for Herbalife, a fantastic global brand…we look forward to seeing these images in print!
Get in touch if you have any enquiries regarding food and drink photography.. we’d love to help capture high quality images of your products!
Call us on 01202 280157 or email us at hello@dephotographic.com.
What The Client Said
These are looking great, thank you so much. The client is really pleased!