Coletti Coffee is a veteran-owned outdoor coffee gear brand built around one idea: real coffee, made over real fire, in real campsites. Their gear leads with stainless steel and enamel construction with no aluminum and no plastic, designed for campfires, camp stoves, and backcountry mornings. They brought me on for a one-day product photography shoot at a campground in Pine Valley, Utah, with full creative control.
We started a real fire that morning, ground real beans, brewed real coffee in the percolator we were photographing, and drank it on location between setups. That posture matters for a brand whose tagline is engineered for the outdoors. Studio product photography with prop fire and stock backgrounds would have undercut the entire brand promise. The brief I gave myself was to make every frame look like a morning a customer would actually want to have, and to shoot the gear the same way it gets used.
The final image set covered Coletti’s percolator and the gear that goes with it across product photography, lifestyle photography, and brand context shots. The work has since appeared on their website and across their broader marketing footprint. Outdoor brand photography lives or dies on whether the imagery feels real, and the fastest way to make it feel real is to actually be outdoors with the product working the way it was built to work. Coletti paid in coffee gear and supplies rather than cash, which is its own kind of trade. The work was worth it. The gear still gets used. The frames still get used too.
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