Telihano is a photo studio at Weena 455 in Rotterdam, shooting product sets for webshops and weddings across the Netherlands since 2013, with a small crew that handles everything from the first email to the final retouch.
Room one on a Tuesday morning. Coffee cup not in frame, sadly.
We are not an agency and we are not pretending to be one. Telihano is three people who shoot, retouch and plan, plus a handful of freelancers we call when a job needs a second camera or a second set built overnight. If you email us, one of the three answers.
Most weeks look the same: products on Monday and Tuesday, retouching in the middle, and a wedding or a portrait session on the weekend. It keeps the work varied and it keeps us honest about what we can actually deliver on a given week.
Nothing about the studio happened in a straight line. Here is the short version, without the glossy parts.
Hanna started shooting pack shots for two small webshops out of a borrowed corner on Vierhavensstraat. The first paid job was forty ceramic mugs for a shop that no longer exists.
A friend asked for wedding coverage and it turned out to be a good fit. Bram came on board that summer and brought a second camera, a car, and a habit of arriving far too early.
The warehouse was getting too small for the furniture jobs. We found room one and room two at Weena 455, which had proper ceilings, a loading lift, and a landlord who did not mind a paint backdrop against the wall.
Sample logistics were eating whole days. Sanne took over intake, sample logging and the shooting calendar, which is roughly when the delivery dates stopped slipping.
Too many clients were exporting files by hand for their webshop and their marketplace listings. We now deliver the crops up front, sized for both, which killed a boring job for everyone.
Trained as a graphic designer, which explains why she cares more about how a photo crops in a grid than about which lens took it. Shoots most of the product work and all of the slower, fiddly jobs with shiny surfaces.
Runs the wedding side and speaks Dutch, English and enough German to keep a venue happy. Photographs the ceremony and the dinner, then disappears somewhere quiet to back up the cards before anyone notices he is gone.
Logs every product that arrives, chases couriers, builds the shot lists and tells you straight when a deadline is not realistic. Most clients talk to Sanne more than to anyone else, and that is fine by us.
These are not slogans on a wall. They are the things clients end up noticing after a job or two.
If a deadline is tight or a shot idea will not work with your product, we say so before the invoice, not after.
Nobody has ever bought a product because of a lens name. We spend the time on the light and the set instead.
Getting it right in the camera saves your budget and our evenings. We would rather take one more minute per frame than fix it later.
Your job does not get handed around. Whoever starts it finishes it, which means fewer surprises and fewer repeated conversations.
A product photo needs to make someone stop scrolling. A wedding photo needs to put you back in the room. Everything else, the lighting, the props, the retouching, is there to serve that one job and nothing more.
Everything else we shoot, from team portraits to interiors, is booked around these two.
Pack shots, on-model frames and 360 spins for webshops and marketplace listings. We match the colour to the sample you approved, which matters more than people expect when a customer is comparing your walnut tray to the photo on your product page.
Coverage from the getting-ready hours to the first dance, with a second photographer through the ceremony. Around 600 edited frames go into a private gallery three weeks later, and your guests can download them without messaging you first.
A mix of studio product work, weddings and the odd portrait session that came through word of mouth.
Mondays and Tuesdays are product days. Sets go up in the morning, samples come out of the storage shelf, and by the end of Tuesday most of the frames are shot. Wednesday and Thursday the retoucher takes over while Hanna shoots portraits or small lifestyle jobs.
Fridays are for admin, sample returns and the shooting calendar. Weekends are weddings from May through September, which is why most studio bookings get pushed to midweek in those months. If you can shoot on a Tuesday, you will usually get a better date.
The desk between shoots. Most weeks it is fuller than this.
We have used three studios before Telihano and this is the first one where the photos came back looking like the actual product. The green on our bottles is finally the right green.
Youssef Amrani
Founder, drinks brand in Rotterdam
Bram was there for twelve hours and we barely registered him. The preview landed two days later and the full gallery while we were still away, so we could stop answering questions from family.
Iris Doornbos
Married in Kralingen
Sanne told us our original deadline was unrealistic and gave us a different date. She was right. We still hit the launch, which we would not have done if she had just said yes.
Marloes de Groot
Online manager, homeware shop
Come by Weena 455 for half an hour. Bring a product or two, we will put them under the lights and you can see what the photos would look like.