Background.

As a commercial food photographer, I have a real passion for great products - both new and more traditional.

For me, other than all of the delicious food, a traditional part of Christmas in our home is board games and setting around playing.⁠

After a big Christmas dinner, and with the burden of my indulgent decisions setting in, there is something nostalgic about dusting off the board game boxes, and diving into a board game.⁠

Working from an initial idea I had from a client shoot, and my previous popcorn shoot, I wanted to acknowledge my love of board games and to produce product photography project that plays homage to nostaglic board games, and tabletop gaming culture - additionally pooling inspiration from vintage casinos.

Approach.

When starting any project, either for a client or for myself - I kick it off with a product photography brief that outlines what I’m trying to achieve from my content and the initial mood boards that I can use as a launch pad.

My brief was to produce a few short series of content that took direct inspiration from board game imagery of the late 70’s, and my childhood in the 90’s as well as a throwback to casinos.

This was to create three distinct art directed photography scenes that each focus on one board game each:

The first was a scene around the childhood classic of Connect 4, with the second being a casino themed game of Monopoly, and a chic feeling Scrabble setting. To add a contextual lifestyle element to the scene, I hired in a couple of hand models to interact with the games.

To achieve this I art directed my scenes, with bespoke painted surfaces, velvet curtains, and a collection of props to tie each theme together - topped with soft, yet contrasting studio lighting to convey the feeling of the scenes.

I’m really pleased with how my board game product photography scenes turned out,a nd it was great to do a proof of concept - to bring an idea to life.