If you are an agency producer briefing a campaign in Montreal, or a brand manager building a Q4 launch deck, you already know that commercial product photography Montreal work is a different animal from catalogue or e-commerce shooting. The job is not to flatten a SKU onto white seamless and ship it. The job is to make a single frame carry a brand, a campaign idea, and a media plan, sometimes for two years of paid placement. This page is for the people who write the deliverable list, sign the model releases, and answer to a CMO when the hero shot underperforms.

We run a working studio that handles both kinds of work, but the workflow, the day rate, and the team on set look very different depending on which lane you are in. Below is how we think about commercial briefs, what we expect from a producer when we quote one, and where most agency timelines get into trouble.

What “commercial” means in product photography

In our quoting language, a commercial brief is anything where the final use is paid media, brand-building, packaging, or trade marketing, not a product detail page on a Shopify store. The shot list might be small (sometimes a single hero frame and three crops), but the production scope is larger because the image will appear at billboard scale, in a 30-page brand book, on a CPG carton in retail, or as the bed of a 15-second pre-roll.

The catalogue side of our work, the bread-and-butter product photography service we run for e-commerce sellers, is volume-driven. We push 40 to 120 SKUs through a controlled set in a day, with consistent shadow, consistent white balance, and a tight retouching template. That is a real craft, but it is not the same craft. A commercial shoot for a single fragrance hero might take the same day and produce one delivered file. The price is in the lighting design, the prop fabrication, the stylist, the art-director’s chair on set, and the retoucher’s week after we wrap.

Typical commercial product photography Montreal briefs we handle

The briefs that land in our inbox from Montreal agencies and in-house brand teams tend to cluster into a handful of shapes. We have shot all of these recently:

Advertising hero frames for print, OOH, and digital display, usually one or two key visuals that need to crop cleanly to 4:5, 1:1, 9:16, and a landscape billboard.
Brand launch campaigns where we deliver a system of images (hero, supporting still life, texture and detail, lifestyle context) tied to a launch deck and a tone-of-voice document.
Packaging hero shots for CPG cartons, where the on-pack image has to reproduce well in CMYK at small size and still hold up in a hero render at retail.
Brand book and pitch-deck imagery, the photos that live inside the agency’s own creds and the client’s internal brand guidelines.
Social campaign systems, including vertical hero frames, motion-ready stills with masking layers, and B-roll-style stop-motion frames a content team can re-edit.
Trade and channel marketing, where the same product image is repurposed across distributor sell-sheets, in-store collateral, and a national retailer’s planogram brief.

The thread running through all of these is that the image is a brand asset with a media plan attached to it, not a sales tool for a single product page. If you want to see how the visual language differs between catalogue work and brand-led work, the lifestyle-led brand storytelling approach we use for campaigns is the closest neighbour to a commercial brief.

Pre-production: where a campaign is actually built

Most agency producers know this already, but it is worth saying for brand-side readers: on a commercial shoot, more than half the work happens before anyone turns on a strobe. Pre-pro on a typical campaign brief in our studio looks like:

Reference and mood. We expect either an agency-built mood board or a written tone document. If you do not have one, we will build it with you in a paid pre-pro day rather than guess on set.
Treatment and shot list. We translate the deck into a per-frame plan: aspect ratio, talent in frame, props, surface, lighting key, and which of the references it locks to.
Prop sourcing and set build. Custom surfaces, sourced ceramics, fabricated risers, sometimes a small build by a local set carpenter. For food and beverage, a stylist’s kit and a backup product run.
Casting and model coordination. Hands, partial body, full talent, each comes with its own release, agency, and on-set continuity. For talent agency briefs we expect SAG-equivalent terms in writing before the shoot day.
Tech scout and lighting test. For complex briefs we will pre-light the day before. That cost is real; it is also the difference between a calm shoot day and a panicked one.

A working studio that runs both catalogue and commercial production needs to keep these tracks separate. Our internal product imaging operations page documents the volume-side workflow; commercial pre-pro is the inverse, one frame, eight prep meetings.

On set: lighting, art direction, and the agency chair

The biggest practical difference between catalogue and commercial shooting in Montreal is the agency chair. On a commercial brief, the art director (and often the brand manager) is on set, tethered, and reviewing in near-real time. Our setup for that is straightforward:

Tethered capture to a calibrated client monitor, with a second monitor for the photographer.
A small board with the day’s frames, ticked off as they are approved.
A producer running the clock so we do not lose the hero frame to over-iteration on an alternate.

Lighting design is also different. A catalogue shot prioritises repeatability across many SKUs. A commercial frame prioritises a feeling: the way light falls across a label, the wet line on a cosmetic bottle, the shadow under a sneaker that makes it look like it is about to launch. We build that with continuous light and strobes layered together, gels and flags, and sometimes a 1×1 sourced LED panel that exists because a colourist needs to grade the result against a particular footage codec.

Post-production for advertising use, not e-commerce

Retouching on a commercial brief is a different discipline from cleaning up a Shopify cutout. The frame may be composited from three captures (one for the highlight on the bottle, one for the label, one for the cap), colour graded against a brand reference, and delivered in CMYK and sRGB versions for print and digital use. Liquid bursts, smoke, motion blur, and shadow extensions are usually built in post rather than captured in camera, even when they look real on set.

For Montreal agencies that produce both print and broadcast assets, we deliver layered files (so a finishing house can re-grade for a TV cut), packaged with a brand-colour reference and an ICC profile if the client is going to plate. The retouching budget on a single hero can run to several days. We line-item it on the quote rather than rolling it into “day rate” so finance can see what they are paying for.

Usage rights and licensing: the contract layer agencies care about

Of every part of the job, this is the one brand-side readers underestimate most and agency producers ask about first. On a commercial brief we negotiate, in writing, before the shoot:

Media usage: paid digital only, paid digital plus OOH, broadcast, in-store, packaging, perpetual brand-owned use.
Geography: Quebec, Canada, North America, worldwide.
Term: 12 months, 24 months, in perpetuity for packaging.
Exclusivity: category exclusivity or non-exclusive.
Talent and prop releases: matched to the same window. The model release cannot be shorter than the client’s media licence, or the agency is exposed.

The reason this matters: a “great deal” on a shoot becomes an expensive renegotiation if the brand wants to extend the campaign past month 13 and the talent release expired at month 12. We quote licensing as a separate line so it can be extended cleanly later. For the legal framing, the Copyright Act of Canada is the starting point on rights assignment; for ad-industry norms, the ANA‘s usage frameworks are widely referenced in Canadian agency contracts.

Working with Montreal agencies and in-house brand teams

Our studio is on the island, with parking and freight access for prop deliveries, which matters more than producers usually budget for. The practical realities of running a commercial shoot in Montreal:

Day rate vs. project rate. For a single shoot day with a tight brief, we quote a creative fee plus crew and gear. For multi-day campaigns we usually quote a project fee with milestones (pre-pro, shoot, post) so the producer can phase the PO.
Timelines. A clean campaign with a clear deck and approved props can move from brief to delivered files in two to three weeks. Add a week if talent casting is involved, and another if packaging mockups have to be approved before shoot day.
Bilingual deliverables. We deliver assets with French and English layout-ready safe areas for Quebec campaigns, including space for Bill 96 packaging where the on-pack image must coexist with French-priority typography.
Sourcing. Most stylists, set builders, and talent agencies we work with are local; we keep a short list of go-to collaborators rather than crewing up from scratch each time.

You can see the kinds of campaigns we have shot in the studio portfolio and read the team background on the about page if you are vetting us for an agency roster.

What to send in a brief so we can quote fast

Agency producers already know the drill; this is mostly for brand-side readers commissioning campaign work for the first time. The fastest quote turnaround happens when the brief includes:

A deliverable list with aspect ratios and final-use spec (print DPI, web pixel dims, video frame size).
Layout references or rough comps showing where the image will live.
Reference images for tone, lighting, and styling, even three URLs is enough to anchor a quote.
The proposed media licence: where the image will run, for how long, and in which territories.
Product samples or, if those are not available yet, packaging mockups and dieline files.
A target shoot window and final-delivery date.

If you do not have all of that, send what you have. We would rather quote against a tight deck than a long meeting. When the brief is complex enough that pricing needs a conversation, the contact page is the fastest route in; a producer will come back with questions within a business day.

Where commercial product photography Montreal fits in our practice

We run two parallel tracks under the same roof. The catalogue and e-commerce side handles volume product imagery for brands selling direct. The commercial track, the work this page describes, handles campaign-grade imagery for agencies and brand teams who need a single frame to do the heavy lifting for a launch, a season, or a year of paid media. The two practices share gear and a studio space; they do not share day rates, timelines, or briefs.

If you are scoping a commercial campaign and want a working photographer’s read on the brief before you put it out to multiple shops, send the deck. We will tell you what we would do, what we would push back on, and roughly what a quote would look like before you commit to a roster.