Commercial photography is one of the parts of my work I genuinely look forward to. Every brief is different — one week it’s a coffee importer who wants to show the soul of their factory floor; the next it’s an engineering firm needing images that say “we know what we’re doing”; the week after that, an architectural practice asking me to photograph their building from sunrise into twilight.
What follows is a roundup of four commercial photography projects from across the Western Cape — covering industrial, product, architectural and brand work. Each one was shot for a specific business need, and each one taught me something about commercial photography that the next brief benefited from.
1. Importers Coffee — Factory shoot (Cape Town, 2021)
Importers Coffee is one of the major coffee brands in South Africa, and they wanted images that could work across their website, blog and social channels — but with a story-telling angle, not a sterile product feel. Their team brought me into the factory to shoot the people, the machinery, and the bean-to-cup process.
The brief was straightforward but the execution had to walk a line: industrial enough to feel real, but warm enough to be on-brand for a coffee company. We spent a morning moving through the roastery, capturing both the heavy machinery and the human moments around it — hands selecting beans, the moment a fresh batch hits the cooling tray, the steam off a freshly-pulled espresso.
2. Importers Coffee — Coffee shop in Newlands (2022)
A year later Importers came back for a second round — this time at their flagship coffee shop in Newlands, Cape Town. The need was similar (digital channels, social, website) but the brief was different: less industry, more lifestyle. Show the cafe as a place customers want to be.
Coffee shop photography lives or dies on the small details — the crema on a cappuccino, the morning light falling across a wooden counter, the moment a regular catches a barista’s eye. We shot through a busy morning service rather than a staged setup, which meant working around real customers and real coffee being made. The result: images that feel honest, that the brand could use immediately, and that look at home on Instagram and on a printed menu.
3. Atlantic Steam — Engineering in Durbanville (2022)
Atlantic Steam is an engineering company based in Durbanville, and they needed a small set of images for their digital channels and social media. Industrial commercial work is its own discipline — you’re balancing safety considerations, restricted movement around active machinery, and the brief’s underlying need: the images have to communicate competence and capability without resorting to stock-photo clichés.
The session was a mix of behind-the-scenes process shots and tighter detail shots of the equipment. Behind-the-scenes images tend to perform unusually well on social for engineering and industrial businesses — they show the work being done in a way that feels human, not catalogue. Atlantic Steam’s team walked me through their workflow on the day, which gave me access to angles and moments a tourist-with-a-camera would never see.
4. Bouwer Architects — Architectural project on the West Coast (2020)
Bouwer Architects asked me to photograph one of their projects on the West Coast — a building they were proud of and wanted to capture properly. Architectural photography is patient work. You wait for the light. You wait for the right shadow line. You shoot through the day and into the twilight blue hour, because the way a building sits in different lights tells different stories.
We started during the day, getting the structural shots — clean lines, the relationship between the building and its landscape, the geometry of the architects’ intent. Then we held the light and shot into twilight, which is when commercial architectural images usually come alive. The interior glow against a deepening blue sky, lit from within, was what the architects wanted to show their clients. The shoot ran late, and the best frame of the day was probably the second-to-last we took.
The thread running through all four
What unites these four shoots isn’t the subject — coffee beans, industrial steel, architecture and brand — it’s the way the brief gets answered. Every commercial shoot starts with one question: what does this business actually need these images to do? A factory shoot for social. A coffee shop shoot for a website. An engineering portrait for credibility. A building shot for a portfolio.
If you’re a Cape Town business looking for commercial photography — industrial, architectural, product, or brand — I’d be glad to chat about what you’re trying to accomplish. Browse my full commercial photography work across nine industries, or get in touch to discuss your brief.
