As most of you know, we shoot a lot of original content here. Sometimes it’s in real situations – like makeovers or my house, etc, but these days because of social media we set up a lot of shots in scenarios that don’t really exist. Lies. The Internet is all lies.
Food52 emailed us and asked us to style this beautiful planter by Pigeon Toe Ceramics for them and since we love Food52, PigeonToe and challenges we said ‘sure’. You can grab the planter HERE.
I was like – yeah, we can just throw it together real fast. Of course, I ended up spending like $60 on succulents to put in said planter (I went to the most overpriced nursery in the world in Pasadena). I didn’t want to just do a mediocre shot on white, so we had to actually put in effort.
But few things can really just be ‘thrown together’, and we knew that for social media we wanted it to feel kinda aspirational, but there wasn’t really a budget to paint a wall or go shopping. So by using what we already had in the studio, we ‘threw it together’, which means that we completely set up a fake scenario full of precarious props that at any moment could fall and kill you.
On the left is what it actually looked like in our studio and on the right is the final photo:
Click through to see more of this very life threatening situation.
We already had all the plants and the other vessels?props/blanket, we just had to compose it all together in a the perfect square shot.
A lot of ‘playing’ goes into each shot as you can see here (and this is only like 1/2 of the troubleshooting that we did.)
Life looks effortless, folks, but it ain’t. It’s way more fun (and dangerous and expensive and time-consuming) than that. Head to Food52 to see how a few other people styled and shot it. Also please note that the rope is held in place by brass rods – nice job, Pigeon Toe, nice job. Thanks for my free planter 🙂
*Art directed/written by me, styled by Brady Tolbert and shot by Jessica Isaac.
