Case Study: Shed Product Location Photography

Case Study: Shed Product Photography

The Brief

A garden shed manufacturer based near Halesowen needed professional photography across their full product range. They’d found dpix online, reached out, and invited Darren to visit the site and understand the scope of the project.

The brief was clear: imagery that would showcase the sheds attractively, in a setting that communicated how the products would look in a real garden. The challenge was that the factory site offered no such setting — the surrounding environment was functional and industrial, not the kind of backdrop that sells garden living.

It was late November. The weather was only going to get worse.

The Creative Process

The solution was to bring the garden to the factory. Rather than relocating products or finding a suitable exterior location, Darren proposed building a temporary outdoor set just outside the factory building — a styled garden scene with props, planting and accessories that would give each shed the context it needed.

That solved the immediate visual problem. But the time of year presented a second challenge: winter skies, bare trees and frost-dulled grass are not the visual language of a garden products catalogue. The plan included significant post-production compositing — replacing the sky, adding lush grass and treelines — to deliver the warm, inviting imagery the brief demanded.

It was an approach that required confidence in both the shoot and the editing work that would follow. The client approved the full scope quickly.

Preparation

Coordinating a five-day location shoot around an active manufacturing schedule required careful planning. Each shed needed to be fully assembled and ready for photography before the crew arrived on site — which meant working closely with the production team to sequence the schedule around their own workflow.

The set was built and dressed over the first phase of the project. Garden tools, accessories and potted plants were sourced and styled to create a scene that felt like a genuinely well-used garden space, not a visual shorthand for one.

Every element of the post-production compositing was also planned in advance — identifying the sky plates, grass and tree assets that would be used, and shooting with the composite in mind so the final images would sit naturally rather than looking assembled.

Execution

The shoot ran across approximately five days on site. Working through the product range systematically, each shed was photographed in multiple configurations against the dressed set — ensuring enough coverage for the client’s catalogue layout while capturing the range of styles and sizes in the product line.

Winter light is low and unpredictable. The team worked with available conditions and supplementary lighting where needed, keeping pace with a schedule that had to account for both the weather and the production team’s movements around the site.

Post-production compositing was completed after the shoot — skies, grass and treelines added to each image to deliver the final catalogue-ready imagery.

The Result

The client received a full image library across their product range — sheds presented in a welcoming, aspirational outdoor setting that would have been impossible to achieve on site in November without the combination of location staging and post-production.

The project demonstrated what’s possible when creative problem-solving is applied to an apparently limiting brief: the right setting for this imagery was built from scratch, not found.