Smash Your Seasonal Content this Autumn and Winter With Picture Perfect Photography
The hazy days of Summer are long gone, and the nights are drawing in before you even leave the office, which means we’re deep into Autumn, with Winter on the way.
It’s time for you to change the vibes of your promotional content to reflect the season, especially with a busy revenue period coming up. Black Friday becomes Cyber Monday, then Christmas becomes New Year, and with a new year comes resolutions to lose weight, and get into shape.
Planning ahead is vital to the success of your strategies, so you should already have some ideas on what you want to achieve for your brand, and how you might achieve it. Autumn and Winter are great opportunities to play with your seasonal content, and what better place to start than with your product imagery? Here at Picture Perfect Photography, we work alongside brands in your industry to help them to shine a glowing light on their amazing health and fitness products, and with over twenty years of experience, we’re well placed to provide you with some great advice for maximising your seasonal content this year.
Planning
When planning your seasonal content, you need to consider your ideal customer. Who are they? What are they about? What are their pain points and how does your brand ease them? You should really dig into who you’re targeting with your content, and how to resonate with them. Create mood boards to build the emotion that you want to instil in these ideal customers. These mood boards will guide your photographer to creating the perfect images first time.
Seasonal Opportunities
Despite the cold and the gloom of the outside world in Winter, there are many opportunities to capture your audience’s imagination using photography; the discounts and spontaneous spending of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the feelgood joy of Christmas and the festive season, and the new-starts of January. Plan each one differently, and give your brand the ability to adapt from one opportunity to the next.
Colour Palettes
With each seasonal opportunity comes a different colourway that will drive the mood of your audience. Capturing your products with the right palette for the season will elevate them in the eyes and minds of those that see them.
Autumnal Palettes
Think warmth and the changing of nature, using browns and oranges. Green backdrops work equally well in this season, as do softer tones such as white, peach, cream and blue. For a little more texture, wooden or charcoal palettes are excellent options.
Christmas Palettes
Classic red and dark greens are timeless choices for festive palettes, but the elegance of purple is an outstanding option for Christmas content, as is the excitement of Hot Pink. Equally, light-absorbing black in a minimalist setting will set your products off in a big way.
Health and Fitness Palettes
As many people make a decision to start afresh in the new year, health and fitness are big business. Colour blocking can add depth and intrigue to your products, and some great colourways you can use are blue, orange, apple green, or carnation pink. The nights are also slowly getting longer again, so why not incorporate some white or grey?
Texture
Texture can add another dimension to your products in photographs, evoking new emotions in your audience as they view the images. As with colours, texture is important to get right according to the season. If you use harsh textures, then it evokes strong and rough emotions. Inversely, if you use gentle, softer textures then you incite a softer, calmer emotion.
Autumnal Textures
Autumn is a big season for nature, so natural textures are strong choices for the season. Bold textures are also very effective for Autumnal photography.
Christmas Textures
A bold, shiny texture is a great choice for festive photography, driving positivity and a feelgood factor around your products. Or why not add drama and mystery with a smoky texture?
Health and Fitness Textures
The new year is a time of reflection and self-improvement, so reflective textures are ideal foils for your product and lifestyle photography. Natural textures are also welcome additions to your images, particularly for health and fitness food products.
Undoubtedly one of the biggest factors in photography of any kind, whether product or lifestyle, lighting makes a huge difference to your images. Effective lighting turns a dull or lifeless space into an energetic or atmospheric space. Colours come to life in great lighting. An audience’s mood can be changed instantly, with the way you set up the lights on a product or person.
Products can become something completely different with each new lighting set-up. Details that might sometimes be missed can be highlighted effectively.
In Autumn and Winter, a dark and moody backdrop that reflects the season can be super-effective, with seasonal colourways and textures beneath a spotlight. As the new year brings fresh starts, then you should bring more light into the imagery. Put your products beneath a more natural feeling lighting set-up, and reflect that fresh start of the year.
People and Props
Product photography shouldn’t always simply be an item sitting on an effective backdrop; you should consider bringing in people and props to show your products in a way that can help your audience to visualise themselves with them.
Health and Fitness products, in particular, are often best served by adding some human interaction to them, or a context in which the products might be used. A set of weights in a gym, for example, or a supplement drink in the hands of an athlete – this helps to build an emotional connection with your audience.
If you’re not using models to show your products, then additional props can help to drive a context and connection. If you make and sell fitness food and drink, then add some health and fitness props to the photography, to help your audience make a mental connection between the product, and the benefit. It doesn’t always need to be something huge, it could be a simple tennis ball or a dumbbell. Be creative, ‘tis the season, after all!
It is important to note that the scale of the prop you use will affect how your product is viewed. Too large, and you run the risk of your item being dwarfed by the prop. You want your product to be the main draw of the photograph, not the footnote!
We offer amazing membership packages for individuals and brands that can take the pain out of shooting seasonal photography. We work alongside you to build long term, reusable creative strategies for your content, and deliver professional quality images that are optimised for use on social media, in marketing materials and on company websites. We can travel to photography sessions on location, and are able to independently complete photography shoots in our Barnsley studio, with quick turnarounds. Ask us about CGI or illustration to enhance your product photography or personal brand visuals.
With over twenty years of experience in professional product photography, Picture Perfect Photography is the perfect partner for any business or brand looking to take its product visuals to another level.
Our company owner, Collette Evans, is a award shortlisted photographer and British Bodybuilding champion with a passion for health and fitness photography, and she has garnered rave reviews for her work with manufacturers and retailers in the health & fitness industry, for her attention to detail, enthusiasm for the project, and her dedication to fulfilling a brief to the letter.
