A successful shoot to gain new product photography can help you meet your commercial objectives and gain those engaged customers you’ve been longing for. Capturing your product with creative and professional photography can turn prospects who otherwise would not buy your products into loyal customers. There are three essential steps that will help develop a successful product photography shoot:
- The Brief
- Inspiration and Mood Boards
- Creative Direction
Step 1: Determine your Objective and Gather your Brief
Every photo shoot must start with an objective and ideally a brief or concept. Your objective may be to attract new leads or convert leads into customers, or it could be that your goal is to increase order value by re-engaging past and current customers to purchase more!
Whatever your objective, you’ll want to think about how you will communicate your product, or how your product resonates with your customers to produce conceptual ideas for your photoshoot brief.
With your product photography shoot brief, you should consider for example:
- Are there any important and specific details that need to be captured?
- What type of location would you like featured in your product photography? – Indoors, Outdoor or Studio, etc.
- What are your brand colours?
- Where will the photos be used? Website, social, advertisements, etc.
Having a solid photoshoot brief is hugely beneficial to you and your team as well as your photographer. A good brief will give your photographer all the necessary information to decide how to plan and run your product photography shoot.
Step 2: Gathering Inspiration and Creating Mood Boards
Once you know your objective and gathered information to provide a brief, you can work with your professional product photographer to start the process of gathering inspiration. This could be looking at your competitors and understanding how they market and capture their products, or this could be analyzing certain trends in your industry that best communicate your product or attract customers better.
As part of the Picture Perfect Photography creative process, we build mood boards for each photoshoot brief based on our knowledge, experience, and research to really help bring the client’s vision to life. Creating a mood board with your professional photographer is a great way to explore ideas for your upcoming product photography shoot. It ensures you and the photography are aligned from the very beginning. Here at the Picture Perfect studio, we use Pinterest to include ideas for video, images, colours, and creative retouch possibilities.
Step 3: Creative Direction and Expertise on Shoot Day.
Setting up the shoot and capturing the product is the fun part. However, this is also where you need the expertise of a professional photographer that can provide the creative direction and professional lighting to really make your product pop and shine through photography.
Photographers will need to get to know your product. Understanding how it melts, breaks, moves, sits, tastes, and reflects light – especially under studio lights or on location. Sending some product samples to your photographer ahead of time or doing some test shoots will provide the time and opportunity to see what can be creatively done, as well as help plan the success of your product photography shoot.
Using a professional photographer with a studio that has a variety of props, backgrounds, and locations readily available will enable a wider creative direction, allowing for more creative ideas and a variety of product photography styles that will best match your brief and objectives.
In Conclusion…
Product photoshoots, can be fast-paced as you try to get as many varied shots as you can to match the brief that has been given so it really does help to plan your shots in detail to maximise your time and budget. Aim to capture the essential photos first and then also allow time for experimental images, sometimes these are the best kind! Things can take longer thank you think, as your photographer will want to test, experiment, and be creative to ensure you have unique as well as high-quality product photos for your business – so sometimes it is good to think ahead and book a day or even half a day photo shoot to maximize your time and the result.
So, when you next need some product photography, be sure to keep these three steps in mind to develop your product photography shoot so you end up with winning results!
For more information on our product photography services, check out our services page and why not, reach out to us for a free personalised content audit to understand what kind of photography your business could thrive from to take your brand to the next level and engage your customers.
Download our free guide on How to take Creative Product Photos here.
