When Creative Director Jeremy Grise reached out to photographer Raeff Miles to do a shoot for the Canadian all-natural food and juice company Happy Planet, Raeff was excited to collaborate again with Jeremy.
In the past, Raeff had photographed Happy Planet’s soups in an organic-looking and naturally inspired still life, displaying all the soup’s ingredients. This time around, Happy Planet needed new imagery for their nut smoothies. Jeremy came to Raeff with the concept of having all the ingredients falling around the product.
A previous photograph Raeff made for Happy Planet’s line of soups.
The main goal of this project was to find a fun way of showing the real ingredients of these products. Raeff had to strike a delicate balance between making the food look organic, fresh, and healthy. At the same time, he had to enhance the relative blandness and monotony of the nuts.
There weren’t too many moving parts production-wise. Just Jeremy, Raeff, his assistant, and lots of bags of ingredients, so it was an easy shoot to organize.
Raeff’s first challenge was to make sure they had the right equipment to freeze the ingredients in the air with no motion. Anytime there’s a motion shoot in the studio; it requires many attempts to get the product in the right place. Each time they dropped the nuts around the product, they broke apart and chipped. They ended up going through a lot of nuts. However, Raeff’s favorite part of the shoot was dealing with the liquid chocolate and caramel.
Once we got the liquids at the right temperature to flow nicely it was easy…but very messy!
The hardest part of the project proved to be editing all of the images into a flowing composition. Raeff made sure to shoot a vast number of images to give him many, subtle options in post-production. This also allowed them to arrange each composition exactly how they wanted and made the Photoshop work much more manageable.
The response to Raeff’s images so far has been positive, and everyone wants to know how it was done. Happy Planet has even used the images on their Instagram account:
See more of Raeff’s work on his website.
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