@aknacer. Welcome to part 2 of our talks here with international badass product photographer

… Rob: You forgot rockstaresque.

Aaron: Rockstaresque, Rob Grimm. You can catch him on Twitter @rggphoto. Robb is based out

of St. Louis originally? Rob: Originally St. Louis and I've recently

opened up a Chicago studio. Aaron: Built your Chicago studio, so you'll

be right down the street from our new studio. Rob: Which is great. We're going to be neighbors

and yes, I'm really excited about it. It's been great so far. We opened up last summer

and it's a studio just for me, so I bounce back and forth between the two cities and

it's really phenomenal so far. Aaron: Awesome. Well, welcome to Chicago and…

Rob: It's actually welcome back. I lived in Chicago after graduating college and that's

where I got my first start in the photography business.

Aaron: That's where you got into product photography? Rob: No, actually back then I was working

with a couple of different people. Saden Photo Group, which is now long gone. Abbey Saden,

and Ben Altman, and a couple other people, and Jack Peron. Is that guys still around?

Aaron: I think Jack is, yes. Rob: I think he is, too. He was a really good

fashion photographer way back when. I started doing some internships and assisting around

those studios and that's where I got my foray into the business.

Aaron: Cool. Welcome back then. Rob: It's nice to be back in Chicago, it's

home. Aaron: Cool city.

Rob: Great city. Aaron: We're going through your book now.

Rob: All right, let's do it. Aaron: A lot of really great images here and

we were just talking about the difference between a book versus digital. Like, bringing

an iPad to show people as opposed to a physical book. Let's just touch on that first, just

a minute or so before we go ahead and get into it.

Rob: Sure. Aaron: What do you think the impact is? The

difference? Rob: Well, one's reflective versus luminous

and that has a very different quality on the eye. iPads are amazing. That backlit LCD screen

coming at you, now the retina display, it's just amazing. The colors are so vibrant and

they're luminous and they're just incredible and the technology is something that a lot

of people are obviously gravitating towards. Particularly guys your age, you're very well

versed with all things electronic and digital, so for you it's totally second nature to flip

through an iPad, to look into the different galleries and you can have so many more images

in an iPad portfolio than you can in a printed book.

Printed books take time, they take a lot of money, you got to assemble them, you're pretty

much locked into them once you've printed them, so it's much harder to make changes.

With an iPad, you can go back and forth very quickly. You can remove something and add

something, you can make an extensive number of galleries, so the iPad has a lot of great

features about it. The book does, too. Have a printed book is really interesting. We walk

into every portfolio showing with both, printed and iPad.

Aaron: You do? Rob: Oh, yes absolutely. First of all, when

you go into an ad agency, there's usually multiple people that are looking at your book.

Aaron: Right. Rob: Unless you go in with a bunch of printed

books, you're going to have an issue. You can go in with a couple of iPads and a printed

book and then people can spread out. One thing I try to do is I try to sit with the book,

the actually printed book because that's the time where people are most engaged. As they're

going through it, there's something about being physical with it and tactile, where

they can touch it, and flip the pages, and they can feel the paper, and they look at

the reflected image, and they're drawn into it. They want to know more stories. They ask

me more about the behind the scenes and about how did this image come to life when they

are looking at the printed book than they do when they're looking at the iPad, without

question. Aaron: Really?

Rob: Yes, it's interesting. Now, the iPad is great though. When you have multiple people

coming in, two people can look at it, they can go through it, they can hand it to the

next guy, and it's good for that room setting, but this is where, I think, we still really

get to engage with the prospective clients. Aaron: Yes, it's real.

Rob: Yes, it is. Aaron: It has that real quality to it that

it's not just … it's interesting because the iPad, it is really great to show work,

but it's … you go from emails to Twitter to your portfolio and this is nothing but

your portfolio. Rob: I was talking before; it's a mix of different

marketing approaches. Same thing here. It's good to have the mix of your website, a portfolio

that lives on an iPad, and a printed honest-to-God book that people can flip through. Back before

digital came about, we had to make 10 copies of these and you had to have them all cataloged,

know where they were because in an ad agency would call and you'd FedEx it to them and

they'd have it for a week, and somebody else would call and you'd have to FedEx it, too.

You could have books all over the place. Aaron: Floating around?

Rob: Even locally in town. You'd have three or four floating around different ad agencies.

That's expensive. You had to know where it was. Now, it's great that it's online. People

can get that flavor for you, they can know what your work is like, they can easily and

quickly send your website or a portfolio PDF. I use portfolio PDFs all the time.
Aaron:

Okay. Rob: This book, this exact book is in PDF

format and I send it to clients with great regularity. Then, when they want this this

can be shipped in. Aaron: Perfect. That's kind of like the … gets

their appetite a little bit wet and when they bite, you can send this?

Rob: Yes, absolutely. Aaron: On their way.

Rob: This is a good hook. Aaron: A good hook, there we go, so a printed

portfolio is a good hook? Rob: Yes.

Aaron: Yes, it's gorgeous. You went with a somewhat frosted plastic at the front?

Rob: Yes, this is actually from Lost Luggage. It's one of the ones that they make.

Aaron: Oh, really? Rob: You can buy off the shelf, which is good.

I did have a completely custom book before. Actually, the guy who owned this building

before me was a bookbinder and I had him make my portfolios, which is how I found this building

in the first place. Aaron: Nice.

Rob: Kind of cool. Aaron: Yes, very cool story.

Rob: Those kinds of things are gone now. It's much easier to buy them. There's so many companies

that make portfolios. They're very specific and…

Aaron: They do a great job. Rob: They do a great job. They can customize

it quickly and get it to you where it's not… I hate to say, like a six month process? But

I think back then designing a portfolio, looking at comps, looking at mock-ups, seeing the

first one actually being made … Aaron: Wow.

Rob: Then, going through the rest of it. It could be six months before you have a portfolio.

Aaron: Wow. Rob: It's a lot of time.

Aaron: Your work can completely change over six months.

Rob: Yes, it can. Particularly now. Aaron: Yes, now it can anyway.

Rob: Particularly now, yes. Aaron: Yes, good point.

Rob: Let's talk about it. Aaron: Yes, the printing you do in house,

right? Rob: Yes, we've done this here. You cannot

undersell Epson technology. The Epson printer … digital photography changed this market

completely, so did the Epson. When Epson came out … and Canon and HP, there are a lot

of great printers out, but Epson really changed the game. Before we were looking at sending

all of our books out or we were looking at technology called di-sublimation, which I

don't even think exists anymore, really expensive printers in the studio. Now, we can print

this on a $1000.00 machine. It looks amazing. It's better than offset in some ways. It's

just amazing ink quality and you can do full bleeds. Why not do it here? It's fantastic.

Aaron: You're not getting paid by Epson to say that are you?

Rob: No, I'm not and it's not just Epson. Canon printers do the same thing, HP, there

are quite a few different printers that will handle this pro line and it's incredible.

Aaron: Almost every professional photographer I've talked to, who prints their own work,

they all print on Epson. Rob: Epson did come out with that technology

that changed the game and there's no question. You can proof in the studio before we would

have to send out for Kodak proofs or approved proofs that you can send to clients to make

sure that it was color matching and that everything was right. You can actually do that in studio

now. We hardly do proofs anymore, every once in awhile, but when that transition first

happened, it was great to be able to make the proofs in the studio. It saved you time,

you were able to charge for it, full game changer. Epson really ... they deserve accolade

because they changed the game. Aaron: Good job Epson, I know you're watching

us. Rob: You better be watching us.

Aaron: The president of Epson, John Epson. John Epson?

Rob: It's actually Phillip Epson. Aaron: Oh, Phillip Epson. Well, congratulations

Phillip. Your book is awesome. I obviously love your photography. I wouldn't be here

if I didn't. Rob: Thank you.

Aaron: Of course. I want to talk about a lot of these images, but there are a few that

I'm going to focus on and we'll put those on the screen, as well. Let's go ahead and

start from the back to the front. We're going to start with this image.

Rob: Yes, that image is probably one of the most difficult if not the most difficult job

I've done in years. That was for a company called Yogurtland and it's a soft-serve ice

cream company very similar to Pinkberry, so the creative on this was to have the idea

that everything was swirling from the sky and plopping into your bowl, any ingredient

you want it was all there for your taking. This was tough because soft-serve is soft.

Aaron: That was my nickname in high school. Rob: That was a tough high school at the time,

I bet. Soft-serve is never hard, so getting it to cascade and hold in this shape is impossible

and it squirted out of a machine. It's not like I could just pony up my camera to the

machine, all the lights and get exactly what I wanted and get it to come out in a swirl.

This took a lot of time. First and foremost, I hired a Nir Adar, who is an amazing food

stylist. He's known for his ice cream. In fact, if you're going to shoot ice cream,

he's the only guy that I would turn to. He's out of New York and he's a terrific guy. He

and I talked about this in the production stage. How can we execute this? Quite frankly,

we didn't know yet. We had ideas, but we spent a day and a half just testing. He came to

St. Louis before the shoot two days ahead and we tried one thing after the next. All

the machines were brought in and those soft-serve machines are huge.

Aaron: Giant, yes. Rob: They weight a thousand pounds and I think

the delivery guys were going to herniate on the stairs as they were trying to lift these

things up. We didn't exactly have the pathway to it, so it was a lot of trial and error.

We got to a point to where we figured out … we basically had to use tubing that we

could cut along the slide through packed with dry ice, very fine dry ice that an assistant

food stylist sat and ran through a food processor. Aaron: Wow.

Rob: Powdered. Basically turned to powder, so the tube was packed with that. Nir did

this magical twirl with the soft-serve. It was all placed into a huge cooler of very

finely powdered dry ice so it could freeze without damaging the texture because the other

thing that's a killer about this soft-serve, since it's soft you can't just set it down.
Aaron:

Right. Rob: You can't put it in a freezer without

damaging it and with the nature of this being swirled, we had to see the front, we had to

see the sides for transitions and we had to see the inside back. Really, every element

of this had to be photographed without messing it up, so it was a bear.

Aaron: It was a nightmare. Rob: It was a huge challenge. It's not a nightmare,

it's a challenge and that's what's cool about it because we got to experiment for a day

and a half before we were like, "Bam! We hit it." We tried four or five different things

and they didn't work, they were based on very solid ideas and experience from previous shoots,

but it's fun. That's actually really fun if you can experiment and come up with a new

way. We got it to the point where we figured out how we could freeze these things and then

take them out on set and literally remove that tube from this swirl of yogurt and hold

it on set and get my captures before it died. We just did it over and over and over. What's

interesting about this, we've only got two shots that make up the swirls coming down

and then another shot for the bowl. That's done in three shots.

Aaron: Okay. Rob: Then all of the fruit that was there,

was all hung on wires, shot individually on a background and all that was clipped out

and brought in individually. This thing probably took a week in a computer to make it what

it is, but we shot everything in different pieces. This was a major, major trial and

error, figure it out, make it work, I'm not sure how we're going to do it, but let's figure

it out. Aaron: Yes.

Rob: It's a great project. Aaron: The end result is awesome.

Rob: This gets a lot of attention and everybody stops and goes, "Man, how did you do that?"

Aaron: How did you do that? Rob: First of all, you hire the right people.

Aaron: Right. Rob: You test, you scratch your head, you

figure it out, you go down different avenues until it hits. It's good.

Aaron: Yes. Knowing that it's real, you actually did it, really makes it sell that much more.

Rob: Here's the thing, I think you have to do it that way. It's really important to show

the client's product. You could do this with a fake, you could have an acrylic model made,

it would be a lot easier, you could light the whole thing, but it's an acrylic model.

At the end of the day, even with retouching, it's still going to have that quality. It'll

be a little too plastic. Here, you can see texture in this. You know that it's real,

it's not this plasticized thing and that's really important.

A lot of clients are very conscious about that for legal issue, too, because somebody

… one of the things that we have to walk a very fine line with is being hyper-real.

We call it truth in advertising where we want to make something entice you. You've got to

want that, you've got to want it to the point where you're going to run out and buy it again,

and again, and again. We're going to make it look as good as possible.

Aaron: Better than it would in your hand? Rob: Better than in real life.

Aaron: Yes. Rob: But you have to be careful because it's

… people go and they say, "Well, this doesn't look at all like it did in the ad." They throw