A couple days after being back at home from my journey of trekking over 900 miles on the Iditarod Trail and looking for interesting & exciting images of sled dogs, I did a full-day studio shoot for Alaska’s top fish and game processor — Alaska Sausage and Seafood.
As this was going to be a very large production, with lots of various types of products to be photographed, the owner, several of their staff and their graphic artist and I sat down for a planning meeting a month prior to the shoot date where we went over the range and variety of products, the types of backgrounds and props desired. We discussed and came up with a game-plan to be able to shoot a plethora of product, both ready-to-eat, custom processed, and gift packs in the shortest amount of time. I planned to have 2 studio-sets going at once, so the client could be setting up one shot while I shot another and have plenty of work space tables available for the client to style & prep food as we went along. The client made a list of all the images they needed and took on the largest pre-production items themselves, and did a terrific job— pre-arranging the baskets and boxes in such a way as to show the product very well, yet not take a lot of studio time to do it.
Most of my photography is done on location, but for this we needed a studio. The easiest and most economical option was to use my oversized garage at my house, which is what we did. I set up the backgrounds, lights and tested the set the day before. We started the shoot day at 8:30 by doing all the gift packs first— each gift pack was shot in a box, in a basket and with all the product spread out on straw. By pre-planning this with the gift-baskets ready to shoot, having their graphic artist there to art direct and arrange product, we were able to get all the gift-packs and custom game processing images shot in just a few hours.
I did a set and lighting change as we then moved to shoot ready-to-eat products and show them in a “serving suggestion” way. This was the most fun and creative for me as we played with various props, light and backgrounds. We were done shooting by 4 and the garage/studio was cleaned and ready for our vehicles by 5.
One of the best parts of the shoot was to be able to eat some of the product… Alaska Sausage’s smoked king salmon is just out of this world succulent. These photos will be used throughout the client’s printed marketing materials, in-house for customers to see, and on their website: www.alaskasausage.com .
haha nice, real nice