The Sweet Smell of Success: Lawson Lavender

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

This is the lesson learned from a recent shoot I did for a great local company called Lawson Lavender. Lawson makes and sells the best-smelling lavender products my nose has ever encountered, from candles and soaps to natural household care products like glass and countertop cleaners. Run by the ever-vivacious and awesomely spikey haired Stacey, she and her family actually grow their own lavender on a farm in rural Missouri, harvest it, dry it and then use it to create the Lawson Lavender products. So Stacey approached me and asked if I could do some product shots for them, as they were launching a brand new etsy.com site.

Dirt...



She showed me some examples of photos she liked, and given the adorable gnome that is part of the Lawson Lavender logo, I suggested we play off that and have a "magical forest" theme to the images. Ya know - red spotted mushrooms, 

plus plants...

lots of ferns, perhaps a friendly snail or two? Imagine where a gnome might live, and you'll get the idea. Based on this first concept, I built a set in my studio, beginning with stacking bricks on a table, covering them with a painter's drop cloth and dumping a bunch of potting soil on top. I began adding in greenery

...equals a gnome-y wonderland.

(my son "helped" by trying to add in some fake plastic bugs which I vetoed), sprinking moss and rocks. In the end, it looked like this:

Loved the shot. Got the whole magical fairy land thing going, the light slanting in as if shining through the forest trees. Add in a cute little mushroom and call me the Fairy Godmother. I can see the gnomes capering about as we speak...

Only one problem: it completely did NOT jive with Stacey's new etsy.com site.

When you hire Striking Photography, be it as your wedding photographer or senior pictures, or for a commerical photography shoot such as this one, my number one priority is to produce images that are an appropriate and real reflection of the subject. It may be a technically perfect shot, but if it doesn't work for my client's objectives, then my job is not complete.

So, I came up with two completely different concepts and went in a whole new direction with the shoot. Voila!

Much cleaner,

more modern take on the products. What makes the first image awesome was that the colors worked with the product labeling, whereas the second concept played off of the actual usage of the products (cleaning products shown in a kitchen or bathroom, a candle by a bedside, etc.).

In the end, Stacey was pleased with all the ideas but chose to go with the last image, showing the products in the environments where they would actually be used.

And I got to play in the dirt with my kid, which was pretty fun too.