Farm House Lab
Roles - Creative Direction, Photography and Production
The client
Farmhouse Lab is a California-based brand built around the philosophy that what you put on your plate should be as beautiful as it is good for you. Their line of organic dressings — Sunny Avocado, Berry Olive, Green Pumpkin, Red Sunflower — and small-batch pantry goods like the Flower Petal Salt, handcrafted with beet root powder, exist at the intersection of wellness and elevated everyday living. The brand's tagline says it best: Brightens everything it touches. The visual identity already had that quality — warm, coastal, quietly abundant. The work needed to extend it without disrupting it.
The brief
The client needed a full image gallery for social media and marketing — studio product shots, lifestyle imagery, and ingredient-level details — all shot to live seamlessly alongside an existing library built by a different photographer. The look and feel was already defined: warm sunny-day-on-the-coast energy, natural textures, muted tones, fresh produce as the primary prop. The imagery needed to feel like it had always been part of the same story.
The challenge
This is a genuinely harder brief than building from scratch. The work had to honor someone else's established visual language — its restraint, its textures, its light — while still being shot by a different hand. That means no color blocking, no palette statements, no visual moves that draw attention to themselves. It meant becoming a student of the brand's existing logic and executing within it completely, on a tight budget, inside the client's home.
The process
I developed the mood board around a single governing principle: natural, minimalist, and seamlessly cohesive. Every prop decision flowed from that. Ceramics and worn wooden boards as product bases. Terracotta pots and loose dill fronds to create depth and air in the background. Snap peas, endive, chamomile, and pink berry stems placed with intention — never decorative for its own sake, always in conversation with the product's ingredients and color story.
The studio shots were styled to let the dressings speak: the amber of the Sunny Avocado warm against a neutral ground, the full product lineup anchored by botanicals that echoed the label artwork. For the Flower Petal Salt, I let the product itself become the image — a close-up of the beet-pink salt dusted with cornflower, marigold, and rose petals, shot against the same warm cream surface to keep it native to the world.
The outdoor lifestyle work brought the founder into frame — in linen, in her garden, in motion — pouring dressings over arugula and strawberries, tossing red cabbage salads with wooden servers. The brief called for it to feel like a warm sunny day on the coast, and the California garden gave us exactly that. The job was to keep it uncontrived: real light, real food, real moments.
The outcome
The client loved the results across both environments — studio and lifestyle. The shoot covered the full range of what the brand needed: hero product shots, ingredient-level details, and founder lifestyle imagery that put the face behind Farmhouse Lab into the story — pouring, tossing, serving — anchoring the brand in a real person and a real way of living. One standout moment was the kids' dressing: a playful studio shot with a straw in the bottle, sitting in a world that said so good your kid will want to drink it straight. It was the one place in the shoot where the brief gave permission to have a little fun within the palette, and the image landed exactly right. The images are set to roll out across Farmhouse Lab's social channels and marketing, built to blend into her existing library the moment they go live.
Creative POV
Farmhouse Lab sits at a specific point in my portfolio because it's proof of range, not just voice. My natural instinct is color — I think in palettes and I'm drawn to the energy of contrast and saturation. But this project required the opposite: discipline, restraint, and deep respect for a visual language that wasn't mine to redefine. Finding beauty inside those constraints — through texture, light and muted tones. And it's one I genuinely enjoyed. The kids' dressing shot is a small reminder that even within the tightest brief, there's usually one frame where the concept gets to breathe — and knowing where to find it is part of the job.
Client Testimonial
I am impressed with the work Nikitha put into preparation and organization ahead of our photo shoot. It made getting us started seamless. She came in with creative ideas, that added a touch of freshness to the brand we built.
Nikitha shot studio product images, outdoor and lifestyle images all in one session, which was super helpful.
We are really looking forward to using all of the new images! - Daniela Kratz, Founder/Owner Farmhouse Lab