Not every shoot happens in a dedicated studio or a perfectly scouted location. Some of the most interesting commercial photography happens in found spaces that you transform through creative production. My shoot at People Inc.'s office at One World Trade Center was exactly that kind of production. We were creating lifestyle imagery for Pacific Foods, shooting in a kitchen environment constructed within their office space, with a video production team working in parallel on the same day. The result was a high-efficiency production that extracted maximum content from a single day's work in one of New York's most iconic buildings.
The Setup: A Staged Kitchen in an Office Environment
Creating a believable kitchen environment within an office space is a production design challenge that requires careful art direction, thoughtful prop sourcing, and the experience to know which elements are essential and which are superfluous. For the Pacific Foods shoot at People Inc.'s World Trade Center office, the staging involved building a kitchen vignette with surfaces, appliances, food props, and Pacific Foods products that would read as a genuine home kitchen in the final images.
This kind of production design for lifestyle photography is something I approach with real attention to detail. The difference between a kitchen environment that reads as authentic and one that reads as staged often comes down to small choices: the placement of a dish towel, the state of a cutting board, the way light falls on a countertop. Getting those details right is part of what separates lifestyle photography that genuinely communicates from photography that merely depicts.
Pacific Foods: Lifestyle Imagery for a Food Brand
Pacific Foods products, broths, soups, and plant-based beverages, benefit from photography that emphasizes warmth, nourishment, and the pleasure of cooking with quality ingredients. The lifestyle images from this shoot were designed to show Pacific Foods products in use: being poured, being cooked with, appearing in the context of a meal being prepared by someone who clearly enjoys being in the kitchen.
Food lifestyle photography at its best creates an emotional connection between the viewer and the product. Not just here is what this looks like, but here is what it would feel like to cook with this. Building that emotional resonance requires attention to light, to expression when talent is involved, and to the staging details that signal quality and care.
Parallel Photo and Video Production
Working alongside a video team in the same space on the same day creates both efficiencies and coordination challenges. The efficiency is obvious: you are getting maximum content output from a single location setup and a single day of production. The coordination challenge is equally real. Two camera units in a confined space need to be managed carefully to avoid each showing up in the other's frame, and the talent needs to be directed for both still and moving image simultaneously.
I have worked in parallel photo and video productions often enough to have developed systems for making these days run smoothly: clear communication about sequencing, agreed priorities when both units want the same setup at the same time, and a shared understanding with the video team about what each side needs to achieve by end of day.
Commercial Photography in New York's Iconic Locations
Shooting at One World Trade Center adds a dimension to any production. The building carries its own significance, and working in that space brings a particular kind of focus and intentionality. As a New York based commercial photographer, I work regularly in iconic and distinctive locations across the city, and I have developed the production experience to make any New York location work for the imagery being created there.
If you are a food brand, consumer goods company, or production company looking for a photographer experienced in hybrid photo and video productions in New York, I would love to talk.
Read more
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/ How TikTok Changed the Way Brands Find Photographers
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/ Sparkling and Set-Styled: Social Content and GIF Photography for Waterloo Sparkling Water
/ What It Actually Takes to Run a Full Production Brand Shoot
/ On-Location Headshots for the Center for Reproductive Rights: Powerful, Real, and Human
/ On Being a Commercial Artist Who Keeps Thinking About Moving to the Woods
/ What Becoming President of ASMP New York Actually Means
/ Behind the Lens: Photographing Assouline's Archive Library in Manhattan
/ Long-Term Brand Photography for Caribou Coffee: Lifestyle, Social, and In-Store Campaigns
/ Speaking at Index Space: Creative Showcase V5
External
Sigma / Travel the Alps with SIGMA’s Lightweight 18-50mm & 10-18mm Zoom Lenses
Sigma / Behind the Scenes on a Fashion Shoot with the Sigma BF
Sigma / Why I Choose SIGMA Zoom Lenses for Studio Photography
Sigma / A Fresh Look at Berlin Through the Sigma 12mm F1.4 DC Contemporary Lens