No matter what a product is, I guarantee you that it can be creatively photographed. For example, we recently photographed the fantastic new book ‘Elegantly Understated’ by the Fears Watch Company.

Fears is a British watch brand that has been operating from 1846 to 1976; it was recently re-founded in 2016 by fourth Managing Director: Nicholas Bowman-Scargill. Because of my own interest in watches, I have been aware of Fears for some time, first seeing Nicholas appear on a podcast that I used to listen to. Therefore, I just had to get in touch with them to introduce myself and pretty soon after, we were discussing how we could creatively photograph this brand new book.

Fears is a brand that whispers and does not shout, it is elegantly understated as the name of the book suggests. It uses a timeless colour pallet that is instantly recognisable. We therefore decided straight away that these features were themes that we had to incorporate into the imagery. An oxford blue background was used for the images, as well as a silver/grey for some variety. This was also the main colour theme for the book, Fears blue with a silver foil for the text. The book itself showcased a simplistic design with only the name being featured on the front and on the spine. Because of this I decided that it would be best to shoot it using some creative lighting techniques, utilising shadows and highlights to set a scene that the target audience would get lost in.

The brief was to shoot the book as a product, but to also shoot it with some of the pages visible which would show off the content inside; leaving the target audience with no doubt about what they should expect from the book. This was an excellent decision as it is always best to show every aspect of a product, every detail and every feature.

After completing the shoot, the images went into post-production where the second half of the creative magic happens. A photographer’s work is never done after the shoot is finished; the post production is the icing on the cake. The images are first treated in Adobe Lightroom to enhance the details, highlights, shadows and colours. Then they are processed through Adobe photoshop for the final treatment where the more technical adjustments are made. Along with the creative shots, we also took a selection of white-background e-commerce shots for the Fears website and associated retailers.

The creative images were used by Fears for the launch of the new book across their social medias and on the website. These images were also used by journalists and watch dealers in related articles and press outlets. The white-background images were used on the Fears website and also by Waterstones.