Case Study: Fancy Crafts Product Photography

Commercial Product / 1st September 2018

Towards the end of 2017 I was approached by Joe Read of Wyze – a creative digital marketing and web agency – to quote up for a job photographing products for a online craft supply company, Fancy Crafts. Joe told me he was building a new website for the company and they wanted to launch with their whole range of products having been photographed professionally – music to my ears! We chatted about how long it might take and what stylised shots they might need, and I quoted up. Fast forward to June 2018 and the client had selected which products they wanted to continue with and I had mountains of boxes arriving at the studio ready to shoot the following day.

Shoot Details:

– 166 Pots of glitter
– 103 Wooden shapes
– 18 stylised photos
– Estimated shooting time of 24 hours
– Estimated editing time of 12 hours

Price: £1,050

My number one golden rule with product photography is to ensure there is going to be two people on the shoot – either someone as a stylist, an assistant, lighting technician, or, like in this case, another photographer to take photos of products alongside me. This is because spending days on end locked up in a studio by yourself is incredibly boring and I did not become a full time photographer to be bored! So for this shoot I drafted in my fellow photographer and friend Lewis K Smith. There were 3 parts to the job: photographing wooden shapes, pots of glitter and finally the stylised photos. On the first day we decided that I would deal with the wooden shapes whilst Lewis shot all of the glitter pots.

Whilst I was photographing wooden shapes Lewis got on with the glitter – in total 166 pots of glitter:

Believe it or not this isn’t even half of the photos of the glitter pots!Finally, the last part of the project were the stylised photos for social media, web banners, advertisements etc. Joe and I worked to create this on the following day without Lewis, using props provided by the client and made by Joe’s girlfriend to achieve styles and themes that would ultimately show off and sell the products to people visiting the site.