Sam Nicklin Solves Chrome in Camera, Not in Post

Chrome is the hardest surface in product photography: it records the studio, the lights and the photographer along with the object. For "Chrome and Colour", his shoot for Alessi, Sam Nicklin treated those reflections as material rather than error, building the images with coloured paper, careful placement and a lot of patience on set.

The technique is old; the decision is not. Most reflective product work now moves to post-production, where masking and retouching cost less than an extra hour under the lights, and increasingly to generative tools that assemble a scene from nothing. Nicklin reverses that arithmetic. A gradient produced by paper against metal behaves differently from one added afterwards — uneven, interrupted, tied to a physical thing. For a manufacturer whose objects argue about form, that residue of the real set is not nostalgia. It keeps the photograph and the product in the same world.