THE CHEDI, MUSCAT: A Photographer’s Promotional Book

Above is the promotional book that we uploaded to issuu.com titled, The Chedi, Muscat Oman: A Visual Gastronomy, which we created using our photos from the shoot. We had the promotional book in mind before we started the job, so we were able to manage our time and get a lot of the supplementary imagery you see in the book.

Rarely do we get the opportunity to meet chefs as inspiring and creative as Sébastien Cassagnol and Andras Arvay. A few weeks ago we had the wonderful opportunity to photograph the wizardry preformed on the daily by these two at The Chedi Muscat. It was a six day shoot and each day from 9:00 to 1:00 we received new, delicious dishes straight to our table. In those six days we had to machine gun just over SIXTY food photographs for the folks at The Chedi, Muscat. With two cameras working overtime, we captured 24 dishes from multiple angles. In between the major dishes we got some great shots of raw ingredients and various other items around the The Chedi, Muscat resort. With so many dishes, the key to this being a successful shoot boiled down to simply great organization. Before it all got started, we sat down with the chefs, marketing executive and pretty much everyone else in the The Chedi, Muscat office to hash out how the shoot was going to run. We talked about materials we would use as backgrounds and what props to include. We also created an hour by hour schedule of what was to be shot and where. I think one helpful tool in this process and a photographers best friend, was our IPAD. During the meeting, we were able to look at examples from our food portfolio and talk about specific styles and angles that they preferred. This was great because they could point to photos that we had made before and tell us exactly what they liked and didn’t like right on the spot, a crucial part of the planning is understanding what the client envisions. Once it came to shoot day, we had a clear idea in our heads of what the client liked, as well as a rough idea for our e-book which we had planned to make, leaving us to work solely on creating the images.

Of course I must add in that our shoot went particularly well due to having a good assistant. Omar Al Hajri is an up and coming food and hospitality photographer in the Gulf, and a former student of ours. He was a vital part of our team, and helped everything flow smoothly. All in all, considering the amount of work and the limited time we had, it was one of the most stress free shoots we have ever worked on.

In the next few posts we’ll get some Behind the Scenes action up, we got videos, time-lapses and plenty of photos to show!

Here are a few of the images we shot for The Chedi, Muscat Oman