Not long ago, I hired a photographer to shoot some of my recently completed wedding invitations and announcements.
When I'm not designing wedding invitations and announcements, you can usually find me hard at work designing food packaging and other more commercial design projects. When art directing photoshoots for food packages, the shoots are really challenging because food doesn't usually stand up well under the heat of the lights so you have to work very closely with the food stylists to achieve a result where the food you're shooting actually looks delicious and appealing! And, to be honest, a lot of food products just don't photograph well at all, so you have to use alternative food items, or non-food items that look like actual food... which makes things even trickier. I'll tell you this - never once has a piece of grilled chicken actually been grilled in order to get those perfect grill marks you see in photos. They don't come from anything even resembling a grill, I promise you that!
But I digress; and luckily enough for me, wedding invitations and paper products do stand up to the heat of the lights!
While I was overseeing this photoshoot of my work on this particular day, and while the photographer was setting up a few of the shots, I took some quick pictures with my iPhone to document our work process. It wasn't until after I got the final professional pictures back that I marveled at how fun it would be to do a side-by-side comparison of what some of the pictures looked like 'behind the scenes' versus what the camera actually sees and what turns into finished photography.
The pictures are beautiful, and I am so happy - but it's really funny to think about what's "really real", versus what's sort of "fake real". One of my favorite quotes (that I think I made up myself!) is "Perception is reality" and I think it sums this up perfectly.
So, without further ado, here are the ol' before & afters... or Reals & Fake Reals!
