Creating an Easter Wonderland for Honold
- geoffpegler
- Mar 17
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 19
As a bit of a chocoholic (isn't everyone?), I was thrilled to receive a recent assignment from Honold to create their Easter 2025 images. The task involved producing a series of full-page images for Honold's Easter 2025 customer booklet, as well as displays for Honold's shop and cafe windows leading up to Easter.
The project brief outlined the key products to be photographed (such as Duba rabbits, Sabayon egg, Smarties egg, Duba ice cream, and Sabayon recipe with Genovese bread rabbit), aligning with Honold's green colour scheme at Easter while allowing me the freedom to infuse my own creativity and ideas into the project.
This project focused on product photography, which demands a distinct approach and set of techniques compared to event photography projects, which make up the majority of my assignments and portfolio. Event photography involves capturing fleeting moments, requiring quick thinking and adapting to conditions in an environment largely outside my control. In contrast, product photography involves planning a scene or story, creating a set, meticulously positioning products during the shoot, having complete control over lighting and the environment, and utilizing specialized photography techniques such as focus stacking.
Photographing chocolate presents additional challenges (besides resisting the temptation to eat the subject), such as dealing with cocoa powder, flakes, and melting chocolate, which all seem to spread everywhere with even the slightest positional adjustment to any product on set.
The photo session occurred in a "photo & crafts room" at the Honold manufactory in Küsnacht. I captured most images using a photo-box (a mini studio intended for product photography) with constant LED lighting and easily washable plastic backdrops. The basic product photos with added props looked good on either green or plain white backdrops. However, for the key booklet and shop display images, I aimed to create something more creative and "storytelling."
As I continued taking basic test shots, I contemplated how to infuse the images with more of an Easter or Spring vibe and how to craft a narrative or scene with the chocolate rabbits. I experimented with dwarf daffodils and other flowers as props, but they didn't quite work against the plain backdrops. I then began to focus more on some of the artwork and creations scattered around the office. There were several small green boxes covered in fake moss, made by apprentices as exhibition props. I grabbed one, added a few more loose pieces of fake moss to create the appearance of bushes on top of it, placed a few of the chocolate rabbits placed on the fake moss, as if they were grazing on a hillside, and took some test shots.
The look of the "mini landscape" of artificial moss with the rabbits was OK, not great, but the concept definitely had promise. After all, what do some people do with their chocolates at Easter? They hunt for them in the garden or a nearby park. Where do rabbits live? In green, grassy fields. So, why not create an "Easter Wonderland" to showcase the chocolate rabbits and other Easter goodies?
I gathered a few more boxes and fake moss scraps and quickly constructed a blocky landscape with the artificial moss. The rectangular boxes didn't lend themselves to creating a convincing landscape, and the fake moss wasn't quite effective. However, I was now certain that I could craft something usable with a different base structure and by incorporating some real moss to make the scene more visually appealing.
The following day at Honold, I brought approximately 20 empty Tupperware containers, which I secured onto a board that would fit inside the photo-box, stacking them to form the base of a miniature landscape. I then shaped a more undulating surface over the containers using fine wire mesh to complete the basic hillside structure. The greenery was then constructed with patches of artificial grass from a craft store, to create mini-meadows, which I surrounded with real moss (for bushes), mostly collected from my apartment garden. Some of the container lids were used as retaining walls for the moss. In less than an hour, I had a natural-looking mini landscape that I could easily move in and out of the photo-box without dismantling or rebuilding, allowing me to switch effortlessly between "Easter Wonderland hillside shots" and other basic product shots on a plain background.
The Easter Wonderland landscape added considerable depth to most shots (over 40 cm), necessitating focus stacking to prevent numerous blurry, out-of-focus areas in the images. I ultimately used focus stacking for every photo, including the straightforward single product shots for this project. Each final image is composed of 12 to 30 photos taken at varying focus distances. Thankfully, advancements in photo editing software have made processing these image stacks much simpler than it was a few years ago.
The Easter Wonderland photos and Easter Booklet are now prominently displayed in all of the Honold Shops & Cafes leading up to Easter.
Link the Honold Easter Booklet - containing photos taken by me (all full page images except for page 24).
As part of the project, it was also decided to utilize some of the Easter Wonderland images for the new Easter Schoggi Tram (March 14 - 23), which is being launched as part of Honold's 120th Anniversary in 2025. I anticipate it will become an equally popular annual event like the renowned Honold Christmas Schoggi Tram.
If you find yourself in Zürich leading up to Easter, I suggest riding the Easter Schoggi Tram or visiting one of Honold's shops for a coffee and some Easter chocolate. If you do, please share your thoughts on the Easter Wonderland photos with me.
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