For this creative studio shoot with Le Fleur, a Hamilton florist, we created a series of styled portraits combining Chloe’s florals with a simple fashion-inspired studio set.

Rather than photographing inside the Le Fleur studio, we took the flowers completely out of their usual environment and built the shoot around a neutral fabric set, olive backdrop and minimal styling.

The result was a collection of images that sat somewhere between personal branding, product photography and an editorial portrait shoot.

Making the flowers part of the styling

The florals weren’t simply props sitting beside Chloe.

We incorporated individual stems and arrangements throughout the set, including flowers around the floor, in Chloe’s hands and even tucked into her socks for some of the more playful photographs.

Keeping Chloe’s wardrobe predominantly white and black meant the flowers could provide the smaller details of colour without the finished images becoming too busy.

Creating something a little different

Commercial photography doesn’t always have to show a business exactly as it exists day-to-day.

Sometimes a more creative shoot can give a brand imagery to use alongside its everyday content, particularly for social media, campaigns, product launches or anywhere that something more visually unusual is useful.

For Le Fleur, these images have since been used across social media and alongside flower listings within the e-commerce side of the website.

A simple studio set with plenty of variation

The set itself was intentionally quite simple.

An olive wall, white fabric, chairs and plinths gave us a base that could be rearranged throughout the shoot. From there, changing Chloe’s pose, crop and the placement of the flowers created plenty of variation without rebuilding the entire set between photographs.

We created wider editorial-style portraits alongside closer photographs and detail images where the flowers became much more prominent.

Commercial photography can be creative too

One of the things I enjoy about commercial photography is that not every shoot needs to follow the same formula.

There are times when a clean headshot, workplace photograph or traditional product image is exactly what’s needed. And then there are opportunities to create something more styled and unexpected.

This shoot with Le Fleur was very much the latter.