BARON ATELIER
Building the visual language of a leather goods house, from its very first product photograph.
A brand with no images has no idea what it looks like yet. Someone has to decide.
Baron Atelier makes hand-stitched leather goods rooted in the Spanish hunting tradition — gun slips, cartridge bags, ammunition pouches, travel pieces — in vegetable-tanned leather, made in Spain.
I joined at the very beginning, when the brand existed as products and an intention but not as a look. There was no catalogue, no reference imagery, no rule for how a Baron piece should be photographed.
The work has run in two stages ever since: first the catalogue that lets people buy, then the campaign imagery that gives them a reason to want to.
Every product, every angle, one light. The unglamorous half that the shop depends on.
I shot the complete product range for the website: each piece in several positions on a neutral ground, lit and framed the same way every time so that a customer comparing two bags is comparing the bags and not the photography.
Consistency here is not a style choice, it's a commercial one. The moment two products are lit differently, the range stops reading as a range.
Every shoot starts as an idea, not as a location. The location is how the idea gets made.
Campaign imagery has a different job from the catalogue: it has to carry what the brand stands for — tradition, craft, quality — without writing any of those words down.
So each session begins with a concept, and everything else follows from it: where we shoot, who wears the pieces, what they wear, how they stand. On most sessions that concept is built with the brand's stylist, who also handles wardrobe and part of the moodboard; direction on set is shared between us. Shooting, editing and post-production are mine.
We've shot in Zaragoza, Muel, Madrid and London — the last of those built around a trip I was already making, turning it into a session for a piece that needed a city.
Wheat fields
The most Spanish landscape there is. Castizo wardrobe, models who look like they belong to the place, and the light of a field at the end of the day. This one says where the leather comes from.
A day in the field
The same tradition seen from the other side of the Channel: British field dress, a hunting party's setting, and the pieces used the way they were designed to be used. It widens the brand beyond one country's version of the sport.
Urban, exclusive
An exclusive piece needed a register the countryside couldn't give it. Elegant but urban, shot in a city where that way of dressing is ordinary rather than aspirational — which is exactly what makes it read as effortless.
The sessions were already producing motion. It only needed a shape.
Social channels ask for film as well as photography, and every shoot leaves behind more moving footage than anyone ever uses. The piece was built from that material: selected, cut and graded so that it sits with the stills rather than beside them.
The script and the voice-over were generated with AI and then reworked until the tone matched the brand — that rewriting is where most of the time went. The grade, the pacing and the cuts are what turn a folder of clips into one piece.
Selection, cutting and pacing, from footage the sessions had already produced.
Graded to match the photography, so film and stills read as one body of work.
Generated with AI, then rewritten and re-cut until the tone matched the brand.
Two years on, the rules set in that first catalogue session are still the ones the brand shoots to.
What I take from this project into product work is the same discipline: decide the rules once, write them down in the images themselves, and then hold them. A visual system and a design system fail in exactly the same way — when someone makes an exception and nobody notices.
MORRIÑA COMUNICACIÓN — styling and wardrobe, and part of the moodboard on the field sessions. Direction on set shared. Ongoing freelance engagement since the brand launched.