The past few months have been extremely busy at work, so I am only just now playing catch-up with my blog. I haven't had much time for personal work, but have spent plenty of time producing photo shoots for advertising campaigns. It's been a great learning experience for me, so I cannot complain – much!
The campaign that took up most of March and early April to plan and execute was for a large, international supermarket chain. I'm not hiding the client's name, but I'm also not listing it here for soon-to-be-obvious reasons. Their Spanish division hired my agency, Media Consulta, to produce a children's healthy recipe booklet for a traveling football (soccer) tournament they were sponsoring throughout Spain. My design team learned the hard way that German efficiency mixes with "Spanish time" pretty much like oil and water: It was incredibly fun and challenging to work on this campaign, but things I've learned to count on with 100% certainty are that the client will always miss their own deadlines, which always causes your team to have to delay the photo shoot you spent weeks organizing (which consequently also delays design and production deadlines), and the client will still always expect you to deliver the product on time, regardless of their own tardiness – and at no additional cost.
We can laugh about it now, right? Right! Kein Problem. Sin problema.
Delays aside, I was extremely excited to take ownership of this project and produce the photo shoot from start to finish. I researched local food photographers, connected with a handful of talented individuals, negotiated day rates, worked with my design team to select the photographer whose photographic style most complemented our design vision for the recipe booklet, hired and negotiated contracts with the photographer, researched fun, playful recipe ideas for the photo shoot with our designers, then relayed that information to the photographer and food stylist and planned out different visual options for each recipe photo. Lots of client delays in between, and time spent translating kids' recipes from Spanish to English to German. The day of the shoot I was on hand to oversee the food styling and photographing and select the images the agency and designers would use in the recipe booklet. The whole team worked well together, every recipe looked bright, colorful and tasty, and the long, fun day was quite the success!
A "stop-action" video of the the food styling progression for the Cheesy Lollipops photo session can be seen here:
A "stop-action" video of the the food styling progression for the Salmorejo Soup with Spanish Ham and Croutons photo session can be seen here: