Shop Talk: Photo Shoots: Season 1 Episode 14

Dawn and Katie bring listeners behind the scenes to discuss photo shoots for home and design.

After completing a design project, capturing it “on film” (so to speak) to share in a magazine, a book, your website portfolio, social media, an online shop, or an advertisement can be satisfying and essential to sustaining a thriving design business. Dawn and Katie have participated in a number of photo shoots of their work over the years and thought this episode might be a fun opportunity to discuss the process.

Since launching her fabric business in 2008, Dawn has taken many iPhone product shots and, when the budget has allowed, she’s enthusiastically hired professional photographers. These photos provide clients and customers with all the information necessary to help them in the purchase process. Bearing in mind that buyers can’t always touch or hold products, Dawn pays attention to the details; this is key when selling quality items where branding, special features, weave of fabric or material need to be highlighted. Dawn emphasizes that compelling photography to showcase a product or service is invaluable.

Dawn splurged for a professional photo shoot early on when launching a new line of designs. Here, she and the photographer composed shots outdoors, and Dawn was her own model.

Art direction is a fun component of a photo shoot. Comfortably nesting some Oliveira Textiles pillows in a tree hints at the sustainability of Dawn’s products and also comments on imagery borrowed from nature that adorns some of them.

Indoor photo shoots can be more challenging, but often you can move a product to where the natural lighting does it justice.

Dawn has also participated in editorial photo shoots like this one for Yankee magazine.

Katie notes that photographing spaces, like those in a home, pose their own unique challenges. Though Katie has photographed the architectural projects that appear on her website portfolio herself, she’s not really an architectural photographer; she’s a fine-art photographer. Katie appreciates the talents a professional architectural photographer can bring to capturing a home design, particularly the interior. She has participated in editorial photoshoots of her own projects with architectural photographers for magazines and books. And she has created detailed “shot lists” to be used by the architectural photographers working for her publisher when capturing new photography for her two books The New Small House and The New Cottage, both from The Taunton Press.

Here, photographer Susan Teare sits at the kitchen island in the house Katie shares with her husband, reviewing a photo she just captured during the photoshoot for The New Small House, Katie’s first book.

In the upper corner of this page from The New Small House, you can see the green roof photo Katie mentions in the podcast.

Here’s the improvised troll photo Susan Teare captured, from the same project that has the green roof, for The New Small House.

Dawn advises that when magazines come calling for editorial features, say YES. They have the photo equipment and creative vision to really showcase your products and immediately expand your audience. Plus, you will learn a lot about how the stylist sets up the shots and how the photographer lights them. And finally, it’s incredibly rewarding to see your product professionally photographed in a glossy shelter magazine.

Katie agrees. She has had the pleasure of attending several photoshoots of her home design projects for magazines. One of the first was for Cottage Living magazine of a small KHS Garage/Garden Room in Manchester, MA. Though Cottage Living folded long ago, here’s a link to that project on the KHS website. Here’s another early article involving a photoshoot for Cape Cod and Islands Home of a new home in West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard that Katie worked on with her architectural mentor Geoff Koper. And here’s a link to a Rhode Island Monthly article involving a photoshoot of a more recent KHS renovation/addition in Warren, RI. Here, too, is a link to a Northshore Home article involving a photoshoot of a KHS renovation/addition in Wenham, MA that includes pillows, cushions, and window treatments by Oliveira Textiles.

Katie snapped this photo of the KHS Garage/Garden Room during the photoshoot for Cottage Living magazine. The stylist and photographer that the magazine retained set up this shot, and Katie clicked her own photo that benefited from their expertise.

This is a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the Northshore Home photoshoot of the KHS Wenham Ranch House renovation/addition.

This is an earlier photo by Katie of the KHS Wenham Ranch House renovation/addition. Here, Katie asked one of the homeowners to walk through the shot. The resulting blurred person lends the photo scale, motion, and humanity.

This is one of the iPhone photos Katie took for her website portfolio of the KHS Harvard Shaker House renovation/addition. Notice the tripod with the DSLR camera atop it in the distance to the left. Oops.

When capturing informal images for social media (or even for a portfolio), your ever handy smart phone can achieve impressive results. Katie and Dawn both use iPhones but acknowledge that there are certainly other smart phones with good or even better cameras, depending on the situation. Samsung smart phones seem particularly good at capturing low-light images, as this photo Katie’s husband snapped will attest.

This is the evening photo Chris Hufstader took with his Samsung smart phone of the Night Lights display during the holidays at Blithewold in Bristol, RI. This shot inspired Katie to upgrade her iPhone in hopes that the newer camera will better compete with the Samsung :-)

While recording this episode, it occurred to Katie and Dawn that having a professional/architectural photographer on Design Me a House as a future Featured Guest could prove informative. So stay tuned!