Wednesday 18 January 2012

Twinings Teas Fruit "constructions"

From the sublime to - well, this did seem even a bit more over the top than usual.

In 2010 Brand Opus asked me to shoot a series of shots for Twinings Black Tea range.  I do a lot of fruit shots - which I love - and often creating the composition can be challenging, especially when we are using real fruit, which I like to do whenever possible.   There is usually at least one ingredient it's hard to get your hands on - in this case real tea leaves and vanilla flowers.   But the brief for this was unusual in that a range of different crops were required to be used from the same image.   So, the only way this could be achieved (avoiding massive retouching) was to shoot one large composition which covered off all the crops.

In the visuals the fruit looked to be piled up and overlapping so I decided to shoot from above, allowing gravity to help rather than hinder, and also to give me the opportunity to light from the sides for the correct subject lighting and also from underneath to allow for a clean cut out - on all sides if needs be.

But it wasn't until we started constructing that we realised quite how many layers of fruit some lovely (and still nameless) designer had actually visualised.   The set just kept growing and growing as we all held our breath but happily there were no mishaps.   Thank heaven for all those games of pick-up sticks I played as a child!

Here are a few more shots of work in progress (courtesy Brand Opus Art Director John Ramskil):

Twinings Orange and Cinnamon Tea

Twinings Mango and Passion Fruit Tea

Twinings Lemon Tea


And reproduced:



  Thanks also to Alan Dunn (for flowers) Denise Smart and Dagmar Vesely.










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