Case Study: How Ellamax created a brand story for HTA Design
Housing design specialists HTA Design came to us to help them commemorate 50 years of their ethos of “creative collaboration”, sustained by their habit of eating together at work.
HTA Design are housing design specialists. Since the practice began they’ve placed strong importance on meeting daily for lunch to chat, discuss ideas and talk about project issues. They’ve now been doing this for over 50 years and asked us to contribute to their book marking this occasion. We created a brand story by photographing their staff, office and food at their London office over 2 consecutive days.
Ellamax set out to capture their brand story by:-
Photographing the staff at work, in meetings and at meal breaks, showing the relaxed office culture in their stylish workspace.
Photographing the raw recipe ingredients from some of the popular dishes the in-house chefs prepare daily for their staff. Some of the finished dishes were also photographed in our table top studio (spare office!) where the lighting could be controlled.
Photographing the in-house chefs in the process of making these dishes in a relaxed, fly-on-the-wall style of photography.
The first part of our process at Ellamax is to either help, or take over completely, the pre-production and come up with a plan maximising the photography time at your location. This particular brand story was a very interesting one to tell with a variety of different themes captured. Video was not requested for this project, but we are also able to capture video content alongside still photos, should the story call for it.
This particular brand story had a number of elements:-
Photographing the staff at work
We weren’t asked to produce any traditional head shot portrait photos, but instead to capture more relaxed “fly-on-the-wall” style images of the staff going about their daily tasks. Meetings, eating breakfast and lunch, as well as the lunchtime desktop fitness class kept Richard, the photographer, busy. The workspace is a stylish large studio, a lot being open plan, and we really wanted to reflect this with the photography.
Food studio
A spare office became the table top studio for the food photography. The client supplied most of the backgrounds, with us supplying a white linen tablecloth. Props were also supplied by the client.
Finished dishes were photographed, as well as ingredients used in the dishes. Controlled flash lighting was used (a big soft box) to resemble daylight.
Having a separate studio always available, as well as two cameras, meant that the photographer, could easily and quickly switch between capturing informal staff work place images, as well as table top photos of finished food dishes and ingredients.
Photographing the chefs at work
Keeping out of the way, our photographer, using a hand held camera, quickly reacted to what the chefs were preparing and photographed both candid photos and more set up single and group portraits.
Conclusion
At Ellamax we make sure that your particular brand story is well told and sometimes (as in this case) in a number of ways. By having multiple cameras it enabled us to be ready for both the staff workplace photos, as well as the food photos, which were irregularly available due to the wait while the dishes were prepared.
Having time to observe the office environment and staff interactions allowed us to create relaxed, natural photos of the team members that juxtaposed well with the food preparation side of the story.
By taking the time to plan the pre-production, Ellamax were able to deliver a lot of content from a 2 day stills photoshoot, resulting in a varied and creative brand story.