The Indus Valley — Cookware & Kitchenware Catalogue

The Indus Valley sells traditional Indian cookware direct to home cooks, through theindusvalley.in and the major eCommerce marketplaces: cast iron tawas, kadais and paniyaram pans, clay pots, and kitchen tools in neem, sheesham, acacia, pine and mango wood.

In July 2019 they came to us with one of the most organised briefs we have received. Every SKU arrived with its own specified angle set, from worm's-eye close-ups to overhead views, all to be photographed on clean white backgrounds for their product listing pages. The first shoot covered 27 SKUs across cast iron, clay and five kinds of wood.

The challenge sat in the materials themselves. Seasoned cast iron is dark, matte and heavily textured; expose it carelessly and it collapses into a black silhouette. Wood needs faithful colour and visible grain. Clay sits somewhere in between. One lighting recipe could not simply be copied across the catalogue.

The backbone of the work was disciplined white-background listing photography: the specified angles for every SKU, true colour, and enough texture detail that a buyer can judge the casting or the grain from their screen. That discipline is what makes a catalogue read as consistent when it is spread across dozens of product pages and marketplaces.

Alongside the listing images, we also offered a styled tier: textured backgrounds and kitchen setups with real food in the vessels, which we styled in-house. The client's brief paired each vessel with the dish it was made for, dosa on the tawa, paniyaram in its pan, biryani in the clay kadai, so the styled frames showed each product doing its actual job.

Both shoots ran in Studio 1, our main shooting floor in Pallikaranai, Chennai. We photographed everything tethered, on a Canon body with a 100mm macro lens, lit with Godox strobes. The Indus Valley sent representatives who stayed on set from start to finish on both shoots. They were meticulous, reviewed frames with us at the tether station as we worked, and treated the production as a learning exercise for their own team; clearing the angle-by-angle checklist together kept the shoot moving quickly.

A month later, in August 2019, they returned with a second catalogue: 18 SKUs of water bottles. Brushed stainless steel and, above all, dimpled copper are unforgiving surfaces. Every light source in the room appears somewhere on the metal, and each dimple on the copper bottles acts as its own tiny mirror. Where the cookware shoot was about texture, the bottle shoot was about reflection control, and it demanded a very different lighting approach.

The listing images went live on theindusvalley.in and on the brand's marketplace listings, doing the everyday work eCommerce photography is meant to do: showing buyers exactly what arrives in the box. The bottle shoot paid a longer-term dividend for us as well. It pushed us to rework how we light reflective metal, and the process we use today for steel, copper and chrome is considerably simpler than the one we started that shoot with. Two shoots, 45 SKUs, and lessons that still shape how we photograph metal.