How I photographed coffee beans for a new coffee brand

I'm sometimes able to combine my hobbies. I like to design and I like to take photographs. As part of a project I as a graphic designer, I needed to create several pictures of coffee beans that could be used on a coffee label. This post will be dedicated to how I achieved the results displayed in the post.

A picture of me photographing some coffee beans! Alright, this is on sand, but the best results were those photographed on the tiles ;)

What I like about food photography, is that you don’t really need expensive materials. While this is true for most types of photography, there are still some advantages that helped me out when taking these photographs. First of all, the beans were extremely small. Therefore, you don’t need a large background.

Materials used

• A camera (Nikon D600 with 50mm 1.8 lens)
• Light (can be natural light only)
• Coffee beans
• Burlap
• Tripod

I photographed most of these beans on the tiles in the kitchen of my boyfriend’s parents. They had this lovely color which contrasted beautifully with the brown color of the beans.

Process

Allright! On to the fun stuf, meaning I will actually tell you how I did it now ;). The first, but an important step was to seperate the perfect looking beans from those that were not photo-worthy. This is important to make it look as tasteful as possible.

Next, we could position them where the light was best. The light in the Kitchen was quite bright. There were these windows that are faced south and are as high as the walls. Therefore, I didn’t need a flash. The sky was very cloudy, which meant that the light was evenly spread among the coffee beans.

What I did not like was that the shades were still very dark. To solve this, I used a studio lamp with an umbrella. The light of this lamp was not very strong, so I had to hold it really close with one hand, to shoot the picture with the other. In order to make this a bit easier, I used a tripod. It prevented some camera shake as well.

Results

The results are some stock-worthy pictures ;). Some editing needed to be done before the final results could be used on the label. However, I won’t elaborate on this editing in this post. Stay tuned for a Lighroom tutorial!

Contrasty colors

Round shape coffee beans

More beans!

It never ends! Fair enough, it does, this was the last picture.

What do you think? I will soon post the results of the graphic labels when they are finished :)