“Passion” brand Leather bags is a leather bag company in the US that belongs to a friend of mine. When she asked us to product shoot some bags for her in anyway we like, we jumped on the opportunity and got right to it. The bags are downright gorgeous, have fantastic texture and feel really great.
The idea was to be creative and shoot some bags indoors and some outdoors. For the outdoor location we chose a farm house with a lot of grunge, a lake and even a horse. The idea was simple, drive around with the bags, location scout and then execute the shoot making sure the bags look awesome.
The plan was to arrive the previous night and shoot early morning, but as most of my plans, this one got slightly delayed. Funny story, we arrived the previous evening, my friend also came along, parked his car right behind mine, the night before and left his keys inside the locked car because he was scared off by a snake (he screamed louder than any girl I know!!!). A little snake, that’s it, what did he expect, it is a farm after all, and its the monsoon season here.
Anywho, we spent the next morning trying to get his keys out, until finally I watched this video on Youtube- how to open you car without any keys or ruler, and wallah! It took about 2 minutes using this method we had the door open and keys out.
By the time he moved his car, the sun was almost overhead and it was HOT! Actually hot is kind of an under statement. So both Maryam and I got to location scouting, driving around, stopping and taking some pictures. It wasn’t easy and we were both wearing out pretty quick.
Phototalk: In such harsh lighting conditions, a reflector is your best friend, position the product/model in shade, and bounce some of that sunlight onto the product/model, to make some great pictures. At places when shade is not available, you can use a diffuser. I use one of those the 5 in 1 reflectors, when you remove the reflector cover, you are left with a nice diffuser, really handy.
We also used some off camera flash ( Canon 580 ex ) through a soft box, this helped throw some nice highlights on the dark textured bags. Then some Postprocessing, added some yellow to highlights, blue in shadow and that’s it.
Here are some more images from that day.
Indoor shoot coming up in a separate blog post. Stay tuned…