Ostia

This was a project in pushing my creative comfort zone and resourcefulness. For some background, I’m not a formally trained photographer, but made several attempts at shooting the next full-line catalog cover for Belwith Keeler. Belwith Keeler is a showroom quality brand for luxury kitchen cabinet hardware with designs in high end solid brass, glass crystal and even Italian marble. The company prints around 10,000+ catalogs every year.

I knew the photography basics and tried working with what I knew, understanding the important trifecta of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. During the pandemic of 2020, much ingenuity was needed with statewide lockdowns and largely working remotely.

The background texture in the photo was originally an abandoned large scale oceanic life painting, spray painted over in matte black as a statement piece in our foyer when we bought our home. Marble base is part of a C-shaped side table I had acquired long before from Target. Hardware was provided by Belwith Keeler to feature one of the newer collections, Ostia. The Ostia collection is inspired by classic English bar foot rails. It is one of the more unique collections featuring two finishes together, the bar in Matte Black and the posts or feet of the hardware furnished in Brushed Golden Brass.

Utilizing the biophilic design trend, I went for incorporating live plants and flowers. The original concept idea was styled with faux, but with today’s sharp eyes and lenses, faux would not pass the taste test of our interior designers and customers. The cover photo was styled, composed and shot by me on an older Fujifilm X100S with props I had on hand at home under natural light from a stairwell window.

Typographic Details

The catalog was a joy to create. No detail was left untouched from table of contents to index pages in the back. Grids and tables were carefully created and spaced to create clean and organized spreads of vast numerical information. This clean style of laying out tabled information was something I picked up in my early days of mentoring under another designer that has stuck with me years later.