Product Photography: Sword and Stone

Last year we were sent on a photography mission by Tim, the founder of Sword and Stone. Tim’s aim with the brand is creating exciting and edgy (pun intended) high-quality products for budding home chefs! We were lucky enough to photograph his latest product, codenamed “The Spitfire”. We wanted to create a range of environments to show the knife in all its glory.

The Spitfire Chef’s knife in all its glory.

Creating the scenes

Autumnal Veg

We decided to make the autumnal scene fairly rustic looking, so we popped down to the Goods Shed in Canterbury to hunt for some truly earthy looking and photograph worthy veg. We picked out some lovely looking squashes, radishes, shallots and pears, which all had lovely colours and textures, perfect for the scene.

The Beach bar

Moving away from the moody scene we wanted something more fresh and summery; an image which invoked the feeling of a beach bar or warm summer afternoon spent in your garden with cocktails and fresh salad.

The Christmas dinner

Tim also wanted some shots of the knife in action. This one was based around Christmas dinner preparation. We went for a moody atmosphere with a main focus on the knife.

The New Year’s party

As the knife is also a show-off piece we felt a dinner party setting was perfect to help illustrate this. Orange and an old-fashioned cocktail felt like the perfect props for this winter evening party scene.

The launch of the knife!

We wish Tim all the best with Sword and Stone in 2021!

The new knife has now officially launched!

be found featuring the images over on the Sword and Stone website: https://shopify.swordandstone.co.uk/products/spitfire-chefs-knife

Many thanks for checking out this blog!

We are Block Art Media! A Kent based photography and video production house with a passion for image making. We help brands, artists and businesses on their journey by taking their content to the next level.

FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY at BOHO CAFE

---

You’ve got to love when two passions combine, and at Block Art We LOVE food and Photography so when we got the recent opportunity to take some promotional food photos over at Boho Cafe, Canterbury. We were pretty excited.

We were greeted by the waiting staff and the head chef, Chris, who had prepared a selection of the current favourite dishes on the Boho Cafe menu. We set up our gear on the table next to the front windows, for anyone into photography you can read more about the lighting set up below. Our aim with this shoot was to take images which matched the “personality” of each of the dishes whilst matching Boho’s brand. We used lots of woody rich textures and traditional looking fabrics as we felt this complemented the cafe’s bohemian and rustic feel.

One of our favourite images was of a lovely dish of mussels cooked in a Curious Apple cider sauce. Chris explained that he had just got some beautiful rich orange coloured muscles ordered in and explained they were some of the nicest he had seen and tasted.  Their rich colour made for great photography material. The cider they were cooked in was from the folks over at Curious Brewery, who make a whole range of unique ciders and larger (You can read more about their new brewery in the recent Cene magazine article here). The cider had to make an appearance in the shot! We got a cold one out of the fridge and positioned it accordingly. Lovely! We also decided to add one of the 3/4 guitars, which Boho have hanging on the Cafe wall, as we thought it tied the scene together nicely as well as being a nod to the music evenings they host. 

We  were really happy with how the shoot went and the mix of props with great textures and colours created some really nice scene, which complimented each of the meals. And of course getting to try the food after is always a bonus! 

A huge thanks to the waiting staff, manager Rob and the head chef Chris for a fantastic shoot at Boho Cafe.

The Lighting Set Up

We kept it simple but effective with the lighting; we used a mix of diffused window light and multiple bounce cards and reflectors to create beautiful soft even lighting for the dishes. We were lucky that Boho Cafe has a pair of bay windows at the front which made for the perfect spot to set up as it provided beautiful back and side light which work perfectly for food photography.

The Set up: We used diffused window light from the back and side and a variety of bounce cards and reflectors to fill in any harsh shadows. this created soft even light around the dishes

---