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YMCA’s Urban Mushrooms Product Photography

Growing For Good

You may remember seeing some interesting pictures of mushroom kits on my social media just before lockdown, it was a really fun and dynamic commission by YMCA Newcastle’s Calvin Bateson. Calvin is Marketing Communications Officer at YMCA Newcastle and he got in touch with me needing product photography at my studio in Newcastle for the Urban Mushroom project. Urban Mushrooms pioneers ethical and sustainable food production and provides jobs and training to disadvantaged young local people thanks to investment from Sage Foundation and Social Investment Business Group. Production was booming before lockdown and the team needed updated imagery for their website.

The enterprise has been developing it’s tried-and-tested approach to urban farming here in Newcastle with used coffee grounds to produce new, speciality hot pink oyster mushrooms to join their pearl-grey mushrooms in the fresh cap and grow-at-home kit product range. They’re also developing dried mushroom products along with a line of speciality powders and salts. Urban Mushrooms are also supplying ‘chog’ (or stalks) of the oyster mushrooms to Field and Forrest- a producer of vegan convenience food as a meat-alternative. Many of the products supply our local restaurants in Newcastle for high end dishes and creative menus.

Previous to this Urban Mushrooms product shoot, I had captured documentary images of the mushroom production, portraits of the youth employees and volunteers on the urban farm. The brief for me this time was to capture images of the produce and so Calvin arrived with a basket of the weird and wonderfully shaped, colourful mushrooms they grow at the YMCA Mushroom farm. Below are a select few images from the shoot that show the mushrooms ‘in situ’ of food prep, display and macro close up shots of the fungi as the main event! Just feast your eyes on this lot of fun-gi! Soon to be on the Urban Mushroom’s website.

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Crabtree of Gateshead Product Photography

Crabtree of Gateshead is one of the world’s foremost manufacturers of quality metal decorating presses and coating machines. They have an impressive factory on the Team Valley that produces incredibly sophisticated machines that apply the decorative coating to metal surfaces.

The photography brief was to show the breadth of their machine client base and the type of coatings that can be applied to various shapes with professional product photographs. The images are to be used for a future exhibition and for display around the North East premises. This was an extremely colourful and enjoyable photo shoot, with many of their client’s recognisable brands that we see in our kitchen cupboards. I was so pleased to be chosen as their product photographer and i shall look forward to more work with them in the future!

To find out more about their work please visit http://www.crabpress.co.uk and look below to see my studio product shots.

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Ella & Joe, Product Photography

My new client ‘Ella & Joe’ have a fantastic range of online gift products so it goes without saying their product photography is paramount to attracting buyers.

The new Father’s day and charity product are launched on their site this week using my studio shots. Ella & Joe’s Katie worked with me on the styling and props and we found that the studio’s shiny surfaces, in-house props and painted tongue and groove walls were perfect backdrops together with carefully chosen themed papers and flowers.

Before Ella & Joe’s previous photographer retired she had delivered amazing results creating home settings in a studio environment so the pressure was on! I was pleased with the results as the studio lighting had to be just right with a clean feel combined with just enough shadow. You can see the new products below and they are also on the Ella & Joe website on the following link; http://ellaandjoe.bigcartel.com/

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