Brew Crew at Grimross Brewing Co.

Alex Fredericks at Grimross Brewing Co.

Alex Fredericks givin’er the gears at Grimross Brewing Co.

Obviously shooting photos at a brewery is going to be all kinds of fun for all the reasons you can imagine, so when Grimross asked me to start working with them on a new image library for their website and marketing material I clearly jumped at the chance.  I’ve always loved the industrial look of these facilities to begin with, but when you mix in the chill vibes that come with the fact that you’re actually working at a brewery, it makes for some pretty good shooting days.  Grimross just recently launched a couple of new cans to add to the mix as well, so the timing was right on these first few days with the crew.  Big things happening over there, let me tell ya.

Now that we’ve got part one in the books, I’m looking forward to heading back over for some solid days on the brand new patio, and some epic nights on the rock stage.  Beauty of a spot!

Building caskets with Jeremy Burrill

Jeremy Burrill - Fiddlehead Casket Company

If there’s one thing I love, it’s working behind the scenes in someone’s shop and seeing how they build things. It’s probably one of my favourite things to shoot actually, and somehow I seem to do a ton of it. I always learn something on these shoots and there’s usually just so much gold to capture everywhere you look.

This time I got to visit Jeremy Burrill of Fiddlehead Casket Company, and his shop certainly did not disappoint. I will admit, I’ve never really spent much time thinking about how caskets are made, and I suppose maybe it’s not something most people think too much about. But after getting the full run down from Jeremy on his DIY kits, I can tell you for sure that I’ll be heading out in one of his pine boxes when the official time comes. Although hopefully that’s not any day soon, haha.

It was really cool working at the Fiddlehead shop for the day and seeing these things built from the ground up. Gorgeous craftsmanship and very clean design. I will say though, it was a very real feeling when we brought the final piece to the studio for some product shots and I watched him put in the last bunch of dowel pins. That was something else. I just remember looking down while he was closing it up and thinking holy shit, this is actually the “final nail in the coffin” right here. It was pretty wild. I thought for a very short minute that we should get a shot of me laying down in it before he closed it up, but I bailed out on the idea literally as soon as the words came out of my mouth! Too real, too real. Maybe let’s call it a day!

I’ll spare you the marketing material as I’m not the official spokesperson on these beauties, but check out the Fiddlehead website for the full run down when you get a chance. DIY casket kits, man. Think about it.

Behind the scenes with Kings Landing Historical Museum

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Well if anything, at least during these gnarly times I can finally get back to blogging.  What a hard thing to do when you’re busy apparently.  Anyone want a job??

If you could use something else to look at besides our current apocalyptic state of affairs then I guess I’ll keep posting what we’ve been getting up to these days in the meantime. So to start things off, this assignment was awesome. We were hired last fall by Kings Landing Historical Museum to shoot a new image library for all of their upcoming ads etc, and as a bonus I was able to bring on my buddy Matt Miller for the ride to grab a bunch of drone footage (Matt does commercial video work and you can check him out here). I haven’t been to Kings Landing since I was a young kid and I totally forgot about how incredibly interesting this place is and the extent of work they actually have going on there. Such a time warp!

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I had two full days of shooting on the ground with the staff/actors, and Matt was onboard to capture drone shots and video work from the air. It was soooo much fun working with the crew there, and I kinda felt like Matt and I were just basically walking around like Bill and Ted for two days straight. Luckily the weather held out in our favour just perfectly for the week and we pulled everything off without actually having to revamp the plans too much.  Little unknown fact for those of you outside the industry, but trying to time two consecutive full days of shooting ad creative outdoors while depending on what the weather is going to do here is usually hard as frig. This ain’t California, dudes. As a bonus though, I was able to get a wicked farmers tan while we were there, which I suppose is kinda suiting now that I think about it.

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For the most part, day 1 was where we had a lot of the set up and staged stuff as they were going to be using them in ads for this year, so it was nice to get a bunch of that all locked down right away. But what I loved most was the behind the scenes images I was able to capture on day 2. Just being able to see what these folks get up to in the run of a day was interesting enough for me, and actually where I usually like to spend my days behind the lens anyway. For that stuff I ended up using a lot of black and whites, which I felt was working really well considering this place is the set of a 19th century historical museum. I completely lost track of Matt by this point but he was on his own adventures and ended up with some killer shots from the air. Overall a couple of solid sun filled work days, and we felt good coming out of there with tons of gold for the folks at Kings Landing, and the Province of New Brunswick. Beauty of a spot!

Check out the gallery below for a bunch of my favourite behind the scenes images from the shoot, and feel free to plan your next visit to Kings Landing at kingslanding.nb.ca

- Chris G.

Kill Chicago

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It’s so awesome seeing these images still floating around out there for all of Kill Chicago’s marketing material etc. Was such a solid day working with these guys. Total pros for sure. And seeing how they’re about to release their newest album “The Fix”, I figured it would be a decent time to put up a bunch of my faves from this shoot.  Epic times, epic dudes. 

Left to right: Greg Webber, Dillon Anthony, Matt Bowie, and Zach Atkinson.

The funny thing about band photos however, is that I rarely ever get to do them. I know. You’d think that working with musicians on the regular would be a given for me. Especially seeing how I play in bands myself, and my work space here at the studio literally doubles as our jam space/recording studio/rock venue when we finish up our days here. But I think a lot of the time I get pretty tangled up in ad campaigns and corporate work and forget to reel things back in once in a while and focus on anything else. I mean part of it too is that bands don’t often have the budget for professional photos, or at least they don’t think they do. And part of it is because at the end of the day most bands (mine included) really just wanna play rock and roll, so the focus on promo stuff ends up going even further down the to-do list.

Left to right: Matt Bowie, Dillon Anthony, Zach Atkinson, and Greg Webber.

Left to right: Matt Bowie, Dillon Anthony, Zach Atkinson, and Greg Webber.

All that being said however, band photos are definitely one of my favourite things to shoot when they do come up. Getting to experiment more off the page and just straight up try things out is what I actually love doing, so it usually lines up pretty good that way when I’m working with musicians. And I mean frig, hanging out and having sips with some of my favourite people, talking about riffage, and being able to create some killer images at the same time is a pretty sweet gig at the end of the day.  Man, I love my job!

Check out the gallery below for a bunch of images from the shoot, and check out Kill Chicago at killchicago.com

- Chris

Hollywords: Dynamic Perspective in Product Photography

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Welcome all, to the second edition of “Hollywords”. Ironically, I woke up this morning having lost my voice, so these are probably going to be some of the only "Hollywords” to come out of me today. If you’re still unfamiliar with me, my name is Holly Brown Bear and I work as full time photo editor and sometimes videographer here at Bang-On Photography. For todays update I want to talk about my experience behind-the-scenes, filming Chris as he put together a product shoot for the New Brunswick Collage of Craft and Design. It wasn’t long before I started to notice some really interesting points about the way he made everything come together on this shoot. Product photography is a huge topic to cover, but in this post I’ll be touching on some points about a studio product shoot, which is what we were doing here. So let’s go:

Movements Make The Shot

Small adjustments don’t seem like much when you watch someone making them, but slight changes made by skilled hands can make all the difference. Because I know the ropes it was interesting to notice how hyper-focused Chris gets when he’s in the zone at work, the micro-adjustments in between shots don’t change much at first glance, but from a post-processing angle it can save literal hours by the end of it all. It’s always good to know that he’s is thinking ahead, it makes the work naturally flawless, and makes my job faster on the editing side of things. For example, most people might not notice an improperly puffed shoulder piece, or think to turn loose strings into leading lines, but these are the details that need to be seen to make an image really effective for NBCCD’s marketing material.

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Make It Work When You Aren’t Working With Much

Fact of the matter is, not every product shoot is going to be a lifestyle series. A lot of the time in product photography you’ll be expected to shoot from a neutral backdrop, with studio lighting and no model in the shot. Let me clarify, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this simplicity, because in the end the product is the point of it all anyway. For a lot of the NBCCD product shoots we need to photograph this way because the images are used in their design material where there needs to be a certain amount of negative space in the image for ad copy etc. For them, the art piece itself isn’t really the product here, rather the education received in order to create the piece is what they’re marketing towards. Chris is really skilled at taking a something that would normally be shown on a model in a lifestyle image, like one of the dresses from the fashion department, and still making it as dynamic and imaginative as he could if we had done an entire set design.

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Dialling In On Detail

When you’re working with a bold art piece that happens to have a lot of different parts that make a whole, it’s important to get those detail shots that give a fuller perspective of the piece over all. If you’ve read our earlier blog on interior design I also mentioned the importance of detail shots, and lets be honest here if you keep reading our blogs you’ll see this point made continually. Detail shots are everything! When an artist takes pride in their work there is so much more than will meet the eye at first glance, and seeing how the camera captures even less then the human eye, it’s important to get close and personal with the products you’re photographing to really capture the hard work that’s gone into it. Although for this product shoot specifically, rather than showing the detail for detail’s sake we are focusing more on capturing the emotion in the piece that the artists are trying to convey.

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There’s a unique and unaware confidence that comes with years of experience, this is true in any profession, but watching Chris put this product shoot together was a great first hand experience of that. For an inside peek at what I’ve been talking about here check out the video below that I put together from my little behind-the-scenes experience, as well as examples of the final results from this product shoot. Enjoy and check out some of the talented graduates from NBCCD, credited and linked below!

- Holly Brown Bear

(All images copyright Bang-On Photography)

ONB Files: Rogers Electric

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Definitely some of my favourite jobs over the last couple years have been on the road with Opportunities NB. Working on ad campaigns and doing factory visits all around the province is the kind of work I love doing. Especially the industrial stuff. Definitely my all time fave. Maybe it’s because I grew up a hillbilly (well I still kinda am) and I’ve always been around machines of some sort, and usually working on/breaking some of my own. Any chance I get to check things out behind the scenes and work with skilled trades people I’m usually pretty stoked.

A while back we travelled to Bathurst to work with Todd Morrison at Rogers Electric and Machine, check out the new shop, and get some shots for what would later be a series of ads going out in the Maritime Edit and YFC International Airport. Check out a few of the images below for a quick glimpse from our visit, and stay tuned for a new series of updates from the ONB files.

-Chris

All images copyright Bang-On Photography