Photography for preserves, sauces and jams

Glass is half the pack

A jar reflects everything around it: the lights, the panels, the photographer. The lid is a mirror, often gold or silver, and the label sits on a curved surface that distorts it and makes it shine at the edges. The job is to give the glass a clean outline, two thin lines of light that draw its shape, without it giving back the set, and to keep the label flat and legible down to the smallest print: the ingredients and the weight.

The contents show, and have an exact colour

With preserves the product is part of the pack: the red of tomato, the orange of a marmalade, the green of a pesto are seen through the glass, and they are the colours a customer compares with the ones printed on the label and in the catalogue. Jams and marmalades also have depth: lit from the front they turn dark and flat, with light passing through them they glow and show the pieces of fruit. We work with a colour reference on set, and the file is checked against the real product and against the printed pack.

Every preserve has its own time on set

Once the jar is open the clock starts, and differently for each product. A pesto exposed to air starts to darken, its bright green sliding towards olive. Vegetables in oil just out of the fridge, if the oil is olive oil, are cloudy and thick, and only turn clear again at room temperature. A sauce that has been poured starts to dry at the rim of the plate. That is why the set is ready before anything is opened, the products arrive at the right temperature, and there are several jars of each product.

A hundred products, one light

Catalogues in this sector are long: dozens of products, sometimes hundreds, across sizes, flavours and lines. That is where the difference between a set of photographs and a catalogue shows: same light, same framing, same camera height, same shadow, from the first product to the last, so the pages line up and e-commerce can put the products side by side without any of them looking out of place. And when the new flavour arrives six months later, the same set has to be rebuildable, so the new jar joins the range as if it had been photographed that day.

Beside the jar, what goes into it

A preserve has two moments to show: the ingredient it starts from and the table where it ends up. Oranges beside the marmalade, pistachios beside the spread, tomatoes beside the sauce; then the bread with jam, the dressed pasta, the bruschetta with vegetables in oil. These are the images the website, social media and trade fairs need, where the product has to make itself understood at a glance, even to someone who cannot read the label because it is in another language.