I don’t exclusively shoot weddings. No thanks, I’ve been there and it’s too much stress. In fact, a part of my work involves visiting industrial companies and write about what they do. The text is usually accompanied by my pictures. As a former neuroscientist I have a ‘natural tendency’ to figure out how things work and a modern factory has a lot in common with a vertebrate brain. But I won’t bore you with that.

Recently I visited a bakery. Or better: a factory where bread is produced. If you make your own bread, like I do with a small, but very efficient machine, it may look like you’ve just entered a setting for a Star Wars production. Bread from a factory can’t be good, right? Well, in fact, most of the process operators that work in this factory used to work in smaller bakeries and the fundamental process of baking bread hasn’t changed in the much larger factories. It’s all just very, very big.

I took my Leica SL and a couple of lenses to the factory, but I only used my 24 Summilux. It turned out to be a perfect lens for shooting in this setting. With the wide angle I could really show the dimensions of the process and with its maximum 1.4 aperture I didn’t have to worry about the amount of light.

I’ll never win any awards with these shots, but that’s not the purpose of them either. Sometimes you’ll just have to show the things as they are, nothing more, nothing less.

Thousands of loaf pans are used in the factory
But the process starts at one of the three lines where they mix the dough.
Here’s a batch of buns that just came out of the mega ovens. You can actually see me and the process operator in the reflection
Bread is cooled down to be able to process it quicker to the packing department
And here’s what that looks like slightly closer up
And here’s the final step: quality check and packing.