Please enter your email and website or LinkedIn to receive more information about our free and paid accounts.
Please enter your email address below and we’ll send you instructions on how to change your password.
Hailing from lands of longhorns and leather goods, Dallas photographer Tadd Myers is no stranger to the craftsmanship of the cattle industry. By meticulously creating images that feel both industrial and home-grown, Tadd has built an aesthetic that appeals to both industrial and food clients. For top notch meat packaging company Standard Meat, hiring Tadd for their latest campaign was an easy choice.
Agency HZDG, responsible for Standard Meat’s campaign, found Tadd through several online searches and responded well to his style of work that featured images of working people as well as food photography. While their initial photographer search was nationwide, they were happy to learn that Tadd was Dallas-Fort Worth based, where Standard Meat also happened to have facilities. Standard Meat, a family-owned business of meat processing and packaging, prides itself on innovative, thoughtful meat preparation that caters to any client’s individual needs. After a few conference calls with creative director, Gillian Goodman, and account supervisor Stephanie Kay, they decided on a loose, realistic style in order to show the authenticity of the Standard Meat production process.
Tadd and his team have quite a bit of experience working to convey an honest, genuine vibe in their work, and their challenge with this shoot was to show the company’s process in a way that didn’t appear to be altered or staged.
By keeping our shooting process mobile and very flexible we were able to create diverse images that tell Standard Meat’s story in a more authentic way.
Gearing up to work in a food safe facility brought along its own set of challenges for the team. Their main goal was to be able to move around the facility with little impact on the floor. Having a larger crew helped, as it allowed Tadd to stay mobile throughout the day.
With 2 assistants and a digital tech (shooting tethered) we were able to move around this sanitary environment with very little disruption to their production lines.
They worked closely with the production floor supervisors to make sure their gear remained safe for the sanitized environments, and had a call with the agency and client to plan where their load-in and staging areas would be located within the Standard Meat facilities.
Our crew had to take extra steps to ensure that our presence that day would not impact food quality and/or safety, which was accomplished by keeping our production footprint as compact as possible.
Another important consideration for the team was how to work in a refrigerated environment for an extended amount of time. The cold temperatures had the potential to affect not only the team, but their gear as well, so extra steps had to be taken to make sure the cold temps would not slow down the crew over the day.
Despite the challenges of working within the production plant, the shoot wrapped with the quality and efficiency that Standard Meat lives by. From their processing and packaging, to their website design and photography, the company takes their standards of excellency seriously, and they were happy to add Tadd’s images to their careful branding.
The images are currently being used for Standard Meat’s new website that went live a few months ago, and Standard Meat purchased a collateral usage license enabling them to use the images in various other applications, including company brochures.
To view more of Tadd’s work, visit taddmyers.com.