Sometimes all you need is a good product photo to help your business stand out, and when you capture a high-quality and creative picture of your product, that could be worth a thousand website visits. Product photography is extremely valuable to help contribute to your online and social media presence as well as move forward your e-commerce website strategy and your marketing strategy.
Product photography doesn’t have to be dull! If you do it right, you can create eye-catching photos of your product and give your audience a clear message of your brand. We’re going to give you five simple tips for product photography to get you started and bring your still-life photos to life.
Tip 1: Try utilising a tripod.
If you’re looking for photo consistency it’s better to make good use of a tripod – we know it’s easy to prop up your phone or camera against something sturdy, but nothing beats a reliable tripod when capturing product photography.
Utilising a tripod to stabilise your camera will help you always maintain consistency and focus, but also as your business grows it provides a standard to maintain for your product photos.
Tip 2: Choose the right lighting.
You have two choices when it comes to product photography lighting, and that’s natural light or studio light. When picking the right lighting, just remember it’s all about showing those important product features to your customers and website visitors.
Natural light or “soft light” is your normal sunlight, where you can simply place your product near a window to get the right natural lighting. Natural lighting is great if your product is used by or worn by a person, or if you’re trying to emphasize the product’s surroundings, rather than any specific details.
Studio lighting or “hard light” creates more focused light on your product. Using studio lighting for your product photography is great to get those crisp and clear details of your product that need to be highlighted to impress your audience – so if you’re looking for e-commerce photography for amazon or your website, or even commercial photography for a campaign, a studio shoot would be best for your product photography.
Whichever lighting you choose, stick to just one type of light per photo.
Tip 3: Set up simple or creative backgrounds.
Choosing the right background is so important and setting it up right one can be crucial for the overall quality of your product photography. When choosing the right background for your product think about how you want your customers to perceive your product when they see it online; you also need to think about your branding, and what will compliment it best.
There are three backgrounds to choose from, white background, colourful and textured backgrounds, or a more dynamic, “real-world” natural background.
Using a white background is perfect for your e-commerce type photos as this will help emphasize key product details and allow the product to be the main focus. White background photography is all about being clean with no clutter and not pulling the attention away from the product.
Colourful backgrounds or textured backgrounds are a creative way to make your products pop! Using bold colours that compliment or even contrast against your product can really help you stand out from the crowd on your social media channels and marketing campaigns, and it will help grab your buyer’s attention as they scroll through their social media feeds.
You can also try taking your camera and product outside. Using “real-world” natural locations and background settings can be very powerful and creative for some products. Like we said earlier, lifestyle product photography is a great way to capture images that are being modelled by a person. Also, capturing lifestyle product photography can provide an insight into your brand. Unlike white background photography, lifestyle product images can showcase personality and be interactive. The product can be shown in context or in an imaginative way.
Tip 4: Use Props to compliment your product.
To get even more creative with your product photography, you can use props to compliment the setting and help the photo stand out. The key to getting the right look for your photo might be down to styling your set-up with props, such as fruit, objects, greenery or even mirrors.
Don’t worry it doesn’t have to be complicated. We advise taking some time to look for inspiration from sites like Pinterest if you’d like to use props but don’t know how. This will also help give ideas of which backgrounds and props work well with your type of product.
Tip 5: Don’t forget to shoot a variety of images.
It’s easy to think you may have the perfect shot, but it’s important in product photography to keep altering, and testing different angles as well as the orientation of the product, and your model’s poses. Also, think about shooting your product photography in both landscape and portrait and think about how your image may crop when uploading to Instagram.
Get started with your product photography with us
You can apply these five simple tips for product photography and see what you can create yourself, however, we know when trying to do the photography yourself it could feel quite time-consuming. This is where we come in to help. We’ll take care of the whole concept to creation process, so you don’t have to feel obligated to invest in any expensive pieces of equipment needed to do your own product photography.
If you’re interested in product photography, either for e-commerce purposes, marketing or socials get in touch we’d love to discuss what we can do for you! Contact us to book a discovery call
