Product Photography – Haines Boats, Norfolk
Haines Marine are a Norfolk based boat builder, specialising in high quality low volume boats so product photography gets a bit interesting when you’re shooting a boat worth a third of a million pounds! Haines are widely known as one of the best boatbuilders in the UK, probably even Europe. So I was excited to get a call from Anglia Afloat magazine when they were planning a feature on Haines Marine.
The brief(s)
I was to spend a day alongside Justin Haines as he took the Haines 360 along the Norfolk Broads. I discussed the purpose of the shoot with Justin as well as Duncan, from Anglia Afloat, and the key purpose of the feature was to conduct a boat test and show general shots around the boat to support the feature. At the same time Justin was keen to get fresh images for their official brochure and so had quite different requirements for the images. With these slightly differing briefs in mind I set about shooting the boat from a feature/journalistic perspective. At the same time I was mindful that Justin wanted active as well as static shots of the boat for their brochure. In the end I covered many of the unique parts of the boat for the in-depth parts of the feature but also hopped onto another boat we had at our disposal to capture shots of the boat “in action”. All in all it was a brilliant day with access to all areas, as well as two very different briefs to fulfil. The backdrop suited the boat perfectly as this an in-shore boat and the weather played a huge part too.
Editing
While the edit was, in the main, very straight forward with colour correction, exposure balance and mild cropping. Due to excavation works alongside the river some composition and cloning work was required to remove the distracting backdrop. In fact one of the shots of the boat is made up of 3 entirely separate images blended together. Also, with the internal shots there was exposure layering work to be done, time-consuming but necessary to get the right balance of light in the image and make it look entirely natural.
