5 years ago back in 2015 when we were still photographing many weddings together in California when Jenny was finishing up her MFA final details (solo fine art show- The Visual Indoctrination of the Bigot-, her thesis published hardback books, AND her defense) AND we then moved back to the Midwest at the end of August/ start of September after she finished her MFA degree, we were also still capturing a decent amount of Commercial Product Photography throughout that crazy busy & productive year.
When were still out in California that year at the start of 2015 we did some projects for food & beverage companies that we’ve never shared here on our blog-! One of our projects was for an alcohol trade magazine out of New York and the stylist drew up how they’d wanted the cover of their magazine shot. This was a very well paying shoot, so we were very excited to tackle it. For the shoot we went out to our mountain house porch in the National Forest and used Jenny’s deck table to capture the image. Jason brought out his “toolbox” specifically filled with items that help in food & product shoots and went to town on fluffing up the grapes. Since the stylist had literally already drawn up the desired cover styling for us, we didn’t need to use too much creativity in styling (moving and posing) the items. The blurry backdrop of the tangled California mountain oak trees was gorgeous though and it brings us good memories. This cover that we photographed ran as the August cover that year-!
Another product shoot that we worked on during this 2015 time later in Jason’s old apartment floor was a shoot for the same trade magazine. Again the layout of the products/ styling was literally already drawn up for us, so really we had to emulate that to a T.
A bit before (I believe the prior year or 2 before) we also did some work for a couple of other semi local restaurants in Santa Barbara focusing on some specific menu offerings. The clients covered a variety of types of food from Italian to desserts and pastries.
That Spring of 2015 we also tackled a client call for stock photo style images of a woman eating British fish & chips. Luckily we had a casual British restaurant where Jenny always got her mushy peas (a dish in Ireland) during her MFA lunch breaks. Jenny got on some neutral clothing, did her hair/ makeup, and we headed there to capture some commercial imagery of woman eating fish & chips for the client.
Jason also did a few lifestyle product photography for an ill-fated iPhone case company while in Santa Barbara.
Out in California that year we also started working with photographing hammocks for a Fair Trade company-! Jenny got creative and wanted to shoot the hammocks in her top favorite 4 places in Santa Barbara, California (our previous home city), so in between Jason working in stock photography and Jenny working on her literal MFA thesis, solo show, and defense presentation Power Point, Jenny gathered some supplies (cutting additional ropes from Ace Hardware & whatnot) and researched the times of sunset/ made plans for the locations. The company sent us two of the fair trade handmade hammocks to photograph which they let us keep and whatever images they liked/ chose from those taken they additionally paid us PER image (over $100) for licensing the photographs for their marketing. One hammock was for ONE individual and the other hammock (a colorful blue & green) was for multiple people to enjoy together-!
We first photographed the individual hammock on our private property up our house in the mountains of Santa Barbara (the national forest lands). Jenny herself found her only stock photography-friendly spring/ garden party-esque dress and an old Target sunhat she had and tried to look pleasant.
We again photographed this individual hammock up the road from the house at Knapp’s Castle. Knapp’s Castle used to be some beams from a large house built 100 years ago that burnt down. Folks would hike out there to see the gorgeous sunset in the valley. That spot has SINCE been bought in the recent years AND DEVELOPED/ BUILT INTO A NEW HOUSE-! It’s crazy to hear this because for years we’d drive up the road from the house to go for a walk/ hike with our roommates’ dogs, visiting family, & visiting friends (none of whom had ever been to California before). Anywho, for photographing the individual hammock there we had to precariously scoot out over a rock beam of a burnt down house to tie it all up correctly. After that we photographed each other in it watching sunset. It was definitely a unique spot that we’ll sorely miss (since it’s now a new house), but we do luckily know and enjoy other trails up there (though the sunset is not as picturesque elsewhere).
(We also snapped a shot of these Viszla dogs who were hanging out up at Knapp’s Castle with their owner! It’s a bit odd that we captured these dogs here together because just a year later we adopted our rescue viszla-greyhound mix Coco).
We took the individual hammock around to one last spot: our favorite beach in Santa Barbara/ California. We set the hammock up (again precariously) in one of the many fallen trees (that came off a cliff who knows when). Jenny got this idea because she was once doing her MFA homework on the beach and helped out a couple who wanted a photo of themselves enjoying their hammock in that exact same fallen beach tree. The spot is unique in that the water comes right up to you under the hammock at high tide. The cliffs there are gorgeous and it’s one of the best spots to watch sunset.
For ONE last spot in California we photographed the large blue & green hammock in the mountains. We initially tried to do so in the literal backyard in the mountains, but there ended up being a lot snakes in the yard, so we opted to head to a different spot.
We went out in Santa Barbara down another road by our mountain house- specifically near Lizard’s Mouth (a beautiful area of boulders/ climbing/ entire city & ocean views). It was really hard to find 2 trees that were a perfect width apart for a regular 2 person hammock, so we struggled in finding such a spot between the boulders, though we eventually did. Last August ‘19 after our niece’s Baby Shower Jenny camped up in the mountains and would head to right there for sunset & sunrise. We again went back for a wedding in September ‘19 to camp in the mountains, but didn’t make it into Lizard’s Mouth because friends were “recovering” and didn’t want to go hiking.
**Jenny accidentally ripped her pants hiking in her khakis.
We also flew in & visited Jenny’s family in Michigan that 4th of July and got a couple photos of Jenny’s parents in the 2 person hammock out at the lake (Jenny’s grandparents’ old home).
At the end of that Summer ‘15 Jenny had already had her solo fine art show for the body of work The Visual Indoctrination of the Bigot AND passed her defense, so while she finished the final edits on her thesis hardbound book, we moved/ drove across the country to Southwest Michigan during the first week of September. We temporarily lived at Jenny’s grandparents’ old house (mostly while no one else was there) and continued with some product photography after we sent Jenny’s thesis book to get hardbound printed to 3 copies (school requirement) AND while that autumn we built an ENTIRELY new website for ourselves (this one HERE)! We both already had had our own professional photography websites for 5.5 years at that point, but wanted to make our combo website fusing all of our wedding, product, and portrait work together since we’d already been dating AND independently working together on projects for a year.
That autumn ‘15 we took on more projects for the hammock company. They sent us ANOTHER hammock- this one in a more natural fabric color again (like the individual hammock), but this had much thicker ropes AND cool straps and hooks that they sell to hang the hammocks.
We first captured detail shots of the hammock out on a pier that Jenny’s family owns. The pier had been wood and gorgeous, but has since been replaced with a metal pier. We went and bought fun colored autumn hard corn and styled it into some of the photos there.
We then took this hammock out to a park in Michigan. There we both modeled individually, then together on the hammock. One of Jenny’s best friends had gifted her a beautiful ceramic mug set the year prior, so we utilized those in the photos. We also used a blanket that Jenny’s grandma had handmade (which we still have in our house to this day)-! That was a weird day because due to needing a specific tree distance, we often had to drape the hammock across trail paths at that park and sometimes people would come along and need us to move the hammock to walk through.
We also took this hammock across the border to a park here in Indiana. We wanted to include MORE fall colors, so we had to search to find some. Jenny also wanted to again include some water in the photos, so we moved the hammock as close to water as we could for that and photographed each other in it.
((Jason getting stuck in the blanket that Jenny’s grandma- RIP- made)).
For another image we opted to move aside furniture out of Jenny’s relatives’ place (no one lived there then other than the 2 of us temporarily) and capture some photos of the hammock inside-! We have extensive experience in styling scenes, products, & people over the past 11 years of professional photography, so we wanted the scene to look clean & uncluttered. We’ve moved heavy furniture for our ENTIRE relationship/ lives (we don’t hire moving companies), so it was just another day of work to us. We snuggled up in the hammock with a book and blanket and tried to look as cozy as possible.
We worked with the hammock company one last time that year for 2015 Christmas-y/ winter hammock photos. This was definitely the weirdest set of images we took (after kind of already having done Spring, Summer, & Fall photos for them) and we had to really stretch our imaginations with this one. We ourselves hadn’t had a really Christmas decorated home in a little while (Jenny having lived on her own for 6 years in her own 1 bedroom apartments, townhouses, and houses post-college in Ohio & California & Jason having never experienced crazy decorations of the Midwest ever before), so we went to town using old family Christmas lights & decor to decorate the house. We wrapped up fake gifts (i.e. empty boxes) and got into the holiday spirit with this one-!
Since then we’ve done a few (& far between) jobs capturing products for some local corporations and private customers. There’s a Lookbook of advertising images that we helped work on for Jansport backpacks (that we do not own) and various other photos and series of images that we’ve captured for non-known corporations. The product images below are those that we captured for a specialty company that repairs and builds medical equipment for MRI machines. This was a unique job since it allowed us to photograph and work with some very high tech and very expensive medical equipment that we otherwise would probably never have even seen. One of the pieces we photographed was worth almost $400,000 which did add a little additional stress in handling the equipment.
For a private seller were hired to photograph their very specialty antique boat to help market it a little better. They didn’t want to put the boat in the water so we had to photograph it next to a lake.
Another food photography project we took on was a tabletop setup for a dairy supplier out of California. They wanted a charcuterie type setup that showed a nice pairing of cheese and some wines mixed with other snacks on a dark slate style background. We always source our own backdrops and love styling products with a keen eye.
Once we were finished with this work for the companies we captured products for back in 2015, we were in the Midwest finishing up our newest website established in Autumn 2015 (this website here-!). We captured Christmas Family Portrait Sessions that winter, then the following year captured a ton of Family Portrait Sessions & weddings while participating in 6 Wedding Expos in Chicago, Indiana, and Michigan to really get our rebranded business name out there even more. Jenny already had clients here in South Bend, Indiana where she’s been photographing weddings for 10 years now (though she lived in Ohio & California throughout all of that and also photographed weddings in Ohio and California when she lived there too), but it was nice for Jason (a California native originally) to really spend the year getting to know the weather, culture, & clientelle here (as well as the friends he hadn’t already met)-!
All-in-all we really enjoy Corporate Product Photography and LOVE when we’re able to work on these awesome projects for our corporate clients, but amidst the past 5 years of weddings, portraiture, and more, we haven’t had much time to scout out many corporate product clients. Needless to say times have been non-stop busy capturing beautiful photographs to last a lifetime for our wedding couples and Portrait Session folks-! (*Though we did JUST buy a really cool studio product tabletop set-up for our studio that has many lights built in in order to even more easily capture products on white or any colored backdrop, so we’re planning on getting back to some more product photography soon-!)
_____ Unrelated: We’ve finished up all current work for clients other than a few product orders that we’re waiting on from a few clients from this summer-! Next week we’ll be capturing Chicagoans Elise & Matt’s wedding at The Morris Estate during their 11 hour wedding day, so we’re excited to photograph their big day so soon. In the meantime, check back next Weekly Wednesday for a fun Halloween update-! (Followed by Elise & Matt’s Wedding Teasers the following week-!)
*****REMEMBER: Many states started EARLY in-person (masked required) voting THIS WEEK-! Get out there and vote if you can, and if you can’t ORDER YOUR BALLOT so that it can get to you AND be sent in by YOUR STATE’S Due Date-! In many states you must post mark your ballot BY OCTOBER 22nd to ensure that it gets there in time to be counted.