Product Photography for La Sirena Cigars

Backstory: La Sirena is the latest release from Miami Cigar & Company, the folks behind standout brands like Nestor Miranda, Don Lino, and a handful of others, if you know anything about Cigars. Smoking cigars is like eating oysters or lobster – you don’t see any bums indulging in these activities, it’s reserved for winners.

The introduction to the La Sirena Cigars brand manager, Arielle Ditkowich, was alley-ooped to me from Max Mogil – currently the Senior PPC analyst CEO for MogilMEDIA. La Sirena Cigars looked to DoggHouse Productions to crush their splash page, full web site, and full line of product photography.

If you are a product based brand, as opposed to service based, in this day & age you are going to need really slutty photos of your goods. La Sirena Cigars has a product line of 5 La Sirena Cigars and 3 Merlion Cigars. There are a few other members of the family but they are being tested before being pushed out with the others members of the family.

So we shot 9 cigars in a variety of ways. The gold foil on the La Sirena bands and the silver foil on the Merlion bands proved to be a challenge to light accurately. Also the subtle differences in height of the cigars meant that each lighting setup was unique for each stick. One shoot was all the sticks on a seamless white background. One shoot was all the boxes open on a seamless white background. One shoot was all the boxes closed on a seamless white background. One shoot was each stick laying in the sand. One shoot was each stick sticking out into the sand. One shoot was all of the sticks sticking out into the sand. And a few more creative shots came about by creating a pattern of multiple cigars laying in the sand, as well turning the cigar boxes into treasure chests by filling them with jewels that I borrowed from my lady friend and her sister. I considered going to a beach and filling up a bucket, but it was easier to buy a 50lb bag of playground sand over at Home Depot for $4.

The results were sharp, effective, slutty, and needed very little photo editing. Stay tuned for an ad campaign shot with some models. The teaser for this project, as well as all of the photos can be seen here: