Styling and Shooting case study at - Tiger Hornsby -

If you follow me on social media you’ll have probably seen some Instastories and publications on my feed about the work that I do for Tiger Hornsby.

Let’s go back a bit, I was first contacted by Rachel, their social Media manager, because she was in need of new pictures for the summer, that was about a year ago. Since then, I’ve been coming back every season or so to shoot some new visual content.

What do I do exactly?

Well, this is one of the favourite parts of my job and this is what happens behind the scenes.

The styling part starts way before the shoot, first I need a brief, here the questions I’m asking are, what season am I shooting, what type of colours/cocktails are going to be made, what type of vibe do we want, bright and light or dark and moody? Then depending on that I will go buy some props, not too much in general, for the spring/summer I will tend to work with flowers and foliage, for autumn/winter I will go with props that I mostly already own, dried orange, star anise, cinnamon sticks… Then I also use components of the drinks, I always ask Ben for some extra bits/slices of what he uses in his cocktails so I can use them in the shot, it can be some orange bark, some lemon slices or some berries…

And then?

Well then I start shooting, I also try to get some backstage to share on insta stories because that’s what we’re supposed to do now right? (I love it actually ahah) I do create a bit of a mess, but I always clean after me I promise! So, the shooting part, well on that part it will depend on where and how you are going to use the pictures, for Tiger Hornsby this is only going on social media, Instagram mainly so I try to be careful with the styling and glass, they need to be big enough to be seen on an Insta feed but not too much, not too small either. So I shoot from several angles, several points of view, wide angles, close-ups, macro shots… (for the technical side, I shoot with two lenses, a 50mm and a 105mm, often on a tripod, sometimes without it kinda depends on how much daylight I’m getting on the day of the shoot) I also use a reflector to bounce the light, you can see it in the picture above, it’s huge and it looks like I’m opening a Quechua tent every time.

Final Steps

Once the shooting is done, like I said well, I clean any traces of my passage ahah, go back to the studio, upload the pictures, do a first selection and create some contact sheets (so basically a first draft of the selection, pre-edited, in miniatures that pretty much look like what you can see below here) so the client can pick the picture they prefer, I do that for lots of shooting, except events where I tend to do the selection. Once they get back to me with the selection, I follow through with the editing, and send an online gallery where they have a month or so to download everything, after that well I need space for the new shootings coming in so I delete the file from my dropbox, but always keep all the edited pictures on a drive. And that’s it! Well, almost, I also get paid you know, like a normal person!