BTS Guava Family
Hey ya'll! Happy 2023! Hope you've had a great January. To tell you the truth, we've been having a hard time getting back into work mode this month. Maybe I should speak for myself but as one of our friends (Jenn Shore of Shore Creative) so perfectly put it, we're all collectively going through this weird COVID hangover where we've had some not-so-great clients, ultimately felt burnt out, and were forced to be creative even when we didn't feel like it. On top of all of that, I also find it a little hard to show up when the world is a bit of a scary place right now with regards to human rights, the economy, and climate change. Alas... this was not how I planned to start this blog post, haha.
That being said... I think it's important to also appreciate, recognize, andddd highlight the clients that are not only incredibly wonderful to work with but make our product photography business fun again. And that for us, was working with Guava Family. Did we ever imagine we'd be shooting baby strollers? HAH! Never in my life, that's for sure but here we are and guess what? It was actually SO much fun. Shooting a stroller was definitely challenging but the ~real challenge~ came during the post-production phase. I definitely plan to do a before and after post on this shoot because the edits were pretty wild. We actually were quite embarrassed of showing our "setups" to our client on Google Meet (while screensharing Capture One) due to the fact that there was going to be a lot of post-production aka background extending and creating digital shapes. You'll know what I mean soon so keep reading along!
Guava Family is a brand that aspires to make the lives of parents and families "just a little simpler, efficient, and elegant." Emphasis on the elegant though because truly... I have never seen a more beautiful stroller. I don't even want kids but I would totally get something like this if I was a parent. So, GF came to us wanting images and a couple of stop motion assets of their stroller in a fun and playful way. Elle really knocked it out of the park with her final ideas and mockups. Below are a couple so that you can see the vibe for yourself. Our client wanted to see the stroller in a few different scenarios all while remaining cohesive. Elle had decided to go for that monochromatic vibe by selecting a few elements that would run through the entire shoot including this grid like pattern, the boxes/risers, foliage, and key prop items that were as close to the brand colors as possible, and the brand colors themselves of course.
Shooting large products always comes with its own set of challenges and this stroller was no exception. One of those challenges included Elle not realizing the product was bigger than it was and so the large particle boards we had set aside for this shoot did not extend far enough to cover the stroller. Therefore, we had to get reallll creative and shoot multiple images/plates to cover the entire background in order for me to composite later in Photoshop. This is the reason why we were embarrassed to show the unedited images to our client via our video chat. Bless his soul for being the sweetest human and somehow being able to visualize what the images were going to look like. 🥲 If there's something you can learn from this, is that you should ALWAYS check your products. This stroller came packaged in the smallest of boxes because of the incredible way it can be folded so we definitely underestimated its size. Honestly, just make your life easier (especially if you're retouching) by going a bit "bigger" than you think as far as backgrounds go.
Like I mentioned previously, this was such a fun shoot and because there were so many moving parts, we accidentally forgot to take as much BTS as we usually do so my apologies. But don't worry! The final images are due to come out sometime soon and we'll share the heck out of them when they do. In the meantime, check out the few BTS images we did manage to capture below. Have you ever had to shoot a really large product? How did that go for you? Tell us over on Slack!
Is it the weekend yet?
Arabela
