There’s something fishy about photography

Shell-fishy to be exact. Courtesy of our client Macduff Shellfish.

Macduff are a 127 year old, family owned and run shellfish processing company. They specialise in Langoustines, Crab, Scallops and Whelks.

They have a processing plant in Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire which is where we’ve been recently doing a photoshoot for them as part of the website project we’re working on.

As anyone in marketing will tell you, imagery is so often king. If you haven’t got good stuff (or even OK stuff), your brand, product or service equity can suffer at the hands of your audience. Imagery offers integrity, transparency and often reassurance, so getting the right stuff to use is really important. Image libraries such as iStockphoto and Getty (OK, so they’re one and the same now) are fantastic, offering creative image options and the ability to search huge databases and purchase relatively cost-effective pictures. But where the big-boys of image libraries can’t compete is accuracy and reality. Basically what I’m getting at is that if you want a job done well (and to ensure you get exactly what you want), do it yourself and commission a photo shoot.

A photo shoot enables you to make a detailed list of everything (and everyone) you need to capture, you can plan it around the business so disruption is minimised and here’s the best bit… you get literally hundreds of images at the end of it to choose from and use in the future.

We’ve been involved with a number of shoots recently, but its not often you get to shoot somewhere quite like a shellfish processing plant (in full operational flow), so we thought we’d share some of our results with you, thanks to the good folk at Macduff kindly agreeing we could do so.

The best bit about environments like this for a photographic shoot, is looking for and finding that creative angle, the clever crop, the perspective or situation that is completely overlooked by the ordinary eye. That ability to take an every day object and capture it creatively to the point where it could almost be something else entirely. Macduff gave us the opportunity to capture their plant and their people in a completely new light, and to be honest, my eyes have been opened to the fascinating processes that are involved in getting shellfish from the sea to our dining room tables.

We spent 1 long day in the factory, took just over 1400 photographs and we like to think there was nothing fishy about the results! (and the least said about the way Jules and I looked in hair nets and wellies the better)

Here’s a selection of the shots we took, courtesy of Flickr…