pistachio press: letterpress wedding invitations

Pistachio PressLetterpress Wedding Invitations

Brittany Profit-Rheinwald

Letterpress from:Pistachio Press250 Goodman St N Rochester, NY 14607(585) 329-2724www.pistachiopress.com

Flowers fom:Arjuna Florist78 Main St Brockport, NY 14420(585) 637-3105www.arjunaflorist.com

Photography from:Brit Profit PhotographyRochester, NY www.britprofitphotography.com

The Corporation for National and Community Service states, “Service-learning offers a unique opportunity for America’s young people to get involved with their communities in a tangible way by integrating service projects with classroom learning. Service-learning engages stu-dents in the educational process, using what they learn in the classroom to solve real-life prob-lems. Students not only learn about democracy and citizenship, they become actively contrib-uting citizens and community members through the service they perform.”

With this process I chose to work with Pistachio Press in Rochester, New York in order to implement and apply my learned knowledge and techniques from my advanced photography class at SUNY Brockport. For this collaboration Pistachio Press asked me to photograph a sampling of their letterpress wedding invitations for use in their catalogs and promotional ma-terials.

This collaboration was quite a learning experience for me and truly pushed me beyond the limits I had set for myself. In the past I had primarily worked in portraiture and had no inter-est of every leaving that genre. However, through service-learning I was encouraged to step outside of my comfort zone and broaden my photographic skills, and that I did. I would have never dreamed I’d love commercial photography as much as I do. I found a sense of peace and relaxation in creating small sets and working with various forms of controlled lighting in order to capture the beauty of the letterpress invitations; something I’d never find in the hustle and bustle of portraiture.

With each set of invitations I wanted to capture a very close detailed image of the finely crafted letterpress in hopes to truly show illustrate the exquisiteness of the medium. I also wanted to create a small set that could serve as a background enhancement for the overall view of each group of invitations to make each image a bit more interesting.

I have no doubt that my skills as a photographer grew tremendously as a result of this col-laboration. I was pushed to find solutions and in that search I explored many possibilities and developed new techniques. For anyone who is interested in service-learning I cannot recom-mend it enough. Not only is it a valuable learning experience for the student but it gives busi-nesses a bit of help while gaining feedback from an outside source; truly a wonderful collabo-ration.

-Brittany Profit-Rheinwald