Happy new year everyone! It feels like I blinked and 2024 was gone… just like that. That being said… I’m feeling particularly excited about this year and all of the goals Elle and I have set out to accomplish. One of them is to publish more blogs in 2025. It boggles me that we used to publish two blogs a week in the early years of our business. Kind of insane. So, while we don’t have that exact capacity anymore (life am I right?!) we still want to provide really fun and valuable content to you all. Therefore, we’ve decided to start publishing content again but in a way that’s more sustainable. We are picture people, not words people, after all… haha! Going forward, we’ll be publishing a few posts a month and that will be anything from BTS, business tips/ideas, commercial photography specific content such as client project workflow, licensing, pricing, retouching, and honestly everything in between. Let’s hope we can make it all happen for 2025. Without further ado, let’s dive into this BTS post.

Elle introduced/shared this brand of canned foods with me called Heyday Canning Co. You can find them at Whole Foods or Sprouts but they have the most adorable branding that gives off this vintage, quirky vibe. I know what you’re thinking. Canned foods?! How can that be cute or delicious but you’d be surprised… Heyday has managed to make canned foods look super cool and tasty. I can attest because I’ve already made plenty of dishes with so many of their cans including the Harissa Lemon Chickpeas as well as the Apricot Glazed Baked Beans. I mean, isn’t that what everyone does after shooting a personal project that involves food? :)

A big goal of ours last year was to shoot more personal projects and I’m proud to say we did exactly that. Elle and I often like to take a look at our portfolio work and ask ourselves what’s missing and we quickly determined that we didn’t have a whole lot of “food and beverage” content to share on our site so that’s part of the reason we decided to shoot these fun Heyday cans. They have quite a large collection of beans, chickpeas, and soups so we decided to narrow down to photographing 6 of their flavors. 3 still images for 3 individual flavors (Apricot Glazed, Kimchi Sesame, and Enchilada), 2 still images for one flavor (Harissa Lemon) opened for texture, and 1 still image of a group that included all 6 flavors. We also planned to create 2 GIFs, one that involved all 6 flavors and another GIF that went along with the Harissa Lemon stills.

Even though these personal projects are meant to give you a lot of freedom creatively, it’s still important to plan out certain aspects of the shoot so that you go in with a game plan and know exactly how the project will look on your portfolio. Sometimes you have to ask yourself: Will a client be drawn to 1 or 2 amazing photos from a project or would your client be more attracted to 3-6 final images that tell more of a story. It truly comes down to thinking about what your client’s needs are and what type of photography you’re catering to. Maybe you’re often shooting for an editorial magazine where one photo is enough or you’re often shooting a brand campaign that requires more images. These are all things to think about when it comes to how you plan for a personal project.

We took all of our equipment, got our products, food and floral props, and headed straight to one of our favorite studios in the Bay Area, Studio Cosita. If you’re not familiar, they’re an incredible photo studio complete with one-of-a-kind props (especially for food and beverage) and an insane collection of backgrounds (both physical surfaces and vinyl). We are obsessed with all of their vinyl backgrounds and have been using them quite a lot lately for many of our shoots. It’s no surprise that we used a few of their vinyl grid backdrops for this shoot with Heyday. If you’d like to take a peek at what they’ve got, be sure to check out Studio Cosita online (plus save 15% with our affiliate link!)

The shoot itself was tons of fun and a big part of it was the bold colors and textures from the backgrounds, the playful props from Studio Cosita’s collection, and the creative styling by Elle. We also wanted to play around with some more bold lighting so we used two strobes to light our set. One was placed to the right side of the scene to create some dramatic shadows and another was pointed at the white wall to bounce some light back into the set. A pretty simple setup overall but we were quickly obsessed with everything we were creating. One of the funnier moments from the shoot was when we decided to place a rock in one of the individual shots (the Apricot Glazed) as a placeholder for me to “generative fill” an apricot or apricot halves. Since apricots weren’t in season, we couldn’t get them for this shoot and figured, welllll… maybe we can just "gen fill it.”

Every shoot has its roadblocks though and we hit them when we got to the first GIF we planned to shoot involving all 6 flavors of cans. Our plan was to have the cans rolling in and out of the scene one by one and well… let’s just say, we shot it, and in all honesty, I think we both knew we were going to scrap that stop motion later. I don’t think we captured it the way we wanted it to and that’s ok. This can happen sometimes but that’s why we do these test projects in the first place to test out ideas and have things “go wrong” so we know what to do in the future. The second GIF was definitely more successful but I need to finish editing it still… oops! So definitely come back to our sit in the near future to check out the final GIF.

These images are a burst of color and flavor and I think that energy really translated into the post-production phase. I’m not going to lie to you guys. I absolutely procrastinated on these photos due to many things going on at the time (client work, Adobe livestreams, travel, and so on) but it made finishing them that much sweeter. We also used our fabulous (and FREE) HDR toning presets so if you’re interested in checking those out, be sure to sign up for our newsletter here to get them.

Truly such a fun set of images that we got to create last year. Feel free to check out some BTS below and a few before & after shots to really see the difference (and impact) that retouching can make on your work. :)