The Client
GHD Hair & R/GA Agency
The Brief
Working with the lovely people from GHD and the Art Directors from the London & New York Advertising Agencies (R/GA), the brief for the advertising product photography was to shoot the whole range of GHD products for a newly rebranded website. The Agency had been working on the website for a while with launch due in only a few months.
After the initial contact, I went for a pre-production meeting at the London agency where, with a conference call with New York, we discussed the plan for the shoot, which included styling, lighting, and background for the products. We agreed that 3 weeks should be pencilled in for the shoot.
The Shoot
A few days later the products arrived along with the Art Director and Marketing Manager from GHD. On day one of such a big & important shoot as this you are ordinarily spending a while making sure the lighting and styling of the products are correct. Fortunately, a lot of planning had gone into the process including crop sizes, shading and background choice.
A main crop was chosen with a slight grey background, which was to be consistent across the whole range. The most straightforward way of ensuring this was to Photoshop the background in post production. All products were shot on a plain white background with a slight shadow. Every image had a path so the product could easily be cut out and placed onto the background.
GHD stayed for a few days to make sure the images were in line with product guidelines for their photography. At the end of every day, the (unretouched) images were sent to the agency to check positioning and crop. Once this was approved then retouching could take place. As you can imagine there were a LOT of images to retouch. On some products such as the stylers the lights had to be shot separately and dropped in and along with colour correction it was a mammoth task.
However, in the end all was done and the client was happy with the end result. It is lovely to collaborate on such an amazing project with such stylish products AND with a great team of Art Directors and Marketing people with a united vision to bring out the best for a Company.
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