Before the Christmas Break of 2014, I decided to do a small project for the company Bevel. They are a shaving company for men that has all the essential tools to keep your face in tip-top shape. It's in the design, products by Bevel are sleek, pristine, elegant and distinctive. It's what sets Bevel apart from their competitors. I wanted to take a chance, to experiment with a photo-shoot. Here's how it began:

 

I was trying to figure out the best concept, to truly understand what would work for this project and what would be the purpose of it. Ultimately, I love the package design, how the product is displayed in the box stood out. From the start, as you open the box, it has so many layers, it's beautifully all pieced together. I figured it would be interesting to dissect the contents of the package and explore how it expands within the box. I found a lot of cool inspiration online, objects floating in mid-air and products suspended in space, that displayed in detail the intricacy's of each product. Sketching took place, figuring out where and how to place each product, how each piece was going to be positioned within the image. My goal was to deliver an image that displayed movement from each individual piece. Starting from the bottom of the box to the top of the lid representing the brand.

 

The challenging part of this project was figuring out how to suspend each product, and how to obtain an accurate angle, so the entire image flows together. Each piece has a different density, which results in varying weight, making manipulation of each piece challenging. The key is to have the right tools for the job. I visited www.filmtools.com and purchased all the necessary equipment, Mini Cardellini, Fishing line, Matthews Micro Grip and this black sticky paste which is super essential to have when positioning each product accurately. Unfortunately, I don’t know the name of the sticky paste but you can find it in any film production stores.For the rest of the project, I decided to keep the light pretty simple, just enough to keep all the attention on the product. With each suspended product, I added fill lighting using a generic white foam board to keep the shadows subtle. By using a fill light, this ensured that a strong contrast wouldn't develop, especially for the small boxes that contain blades and the shaving brush.

 

 

The 2nd part of execution that took quite a bit of time came with the color correcting of each image. Additionally masking the product from the background, retouching, reshaping the product, logo, boxes, etc. took an extreme amount of time. But this had to be done in order for each element to stand out and look sharp.