NEOM Christmas
NEOM
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Shiny
•
Glass
NEOM Christmas.
NEOM's Christmas campaign came out of a brand story about glimmer, about your moments to shine and sparkle, with the product sitting behind that feeling rather than in front of it. It needed to be magical and festive without leaning on anything obviously festive. A candle is a weak light source. Light it properly and you lose the only thing that makes it a candle, because a clean key flattens the glow into a lit object with a small flame on top. I let the flame do the lighting and built everything else around it. The glimmer is optical, made in camera with heavy out-of-focus bokeh discs filling the front and back of frame, warm gels, light streaks across the ground and deliberate flare and haze pulled into the lens.
The glass does the rest. Amber, plum, olive and rose vessels refract and carry an internal glow, so the colour is coming through the product rather than being thrown at it, and very shallow focus islands each candle in soft light. None of the bokeh or the flare is post. It was all in front of the lens on the day. The same in-camera approach runs through my candle photography and the rest of my commissioned still life work. Shot in London by David Lineton.
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