Product photography refers to taking photos of commercial products, with the aim of giving the potential customer a visual image of the product, and urging the customer -by taking attractive photos – to consider making a purchase. Product photos are commonly used on ecommerce stores, but they may also be used on product catalogs, advertisements, promotional materials, and even manuals.
Is it important?
Short answer: Yes. “If you take an attractive photo of your product, you’re more than half way towards selling it online. This might sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but here are some real-world statistics to consider:
- 90% of online buyers say photo quality is the most important factor in making a buying decision.
- 65% of people are visual learners, meaning that for them visual information is the first source of knowledge.
- High-quality photos increase the chance of buying a product 3 times compared to a low-quality one.
- People tend to remember only 10% of the information after 3 days of listening to it, compared to 65% for the same information but associated with a relevant high-quality photo.
It should be clear now that the saying isn’t an exaggeration, and investing in good photos is one of the best marketing practices when it comes to selling retail products online.
Product photography types
There are an endless number of product photography types, but there are some that are used more than others, we list them below:
- Solid backdrop shots:
The most common product photography technique. You will find it in ecommerce stores, promotional materials, product catalogs, and more. The product is photographed without shadows or with simple side shadows from different angles, against a mostly curved, white backdrop, so that the product appears to be suspended in the air. This technique can be used with a single or multiple products.
- Scale shots:
The problem with the previous technique is that it does not give the consumer an idea about the product size, so an item of known dimensions may be added to the photo (such as a coin, hand, or credit card) to offer a sense of scale.
- Lifestyle shots:
The problem with solid backdrop shots is that they do not show your products in action, and this may not fit with some product categories. Therefore, products such as clothing, watches, wearable accessories, jewelry, furniture and electronic devices may be photographed in a real environment. This technique offers more freedom to the photographer to be creative compared to solid backdrop shots, also, offers a sense of scale for the consumer.
- 360-degree shots
This technique is mostly used with luxury products, such as watches, jewelry and bags, and requires special cameras. The consumers can interact with the image and move it at any angle or position they want.
Remember that you are not forced to limit yourself to these techniques; you are an artist before you are a product photographer; therefore, any new technique that you think may contribute to showing the product in a more impressive way is not worth keeping for yourself, instead, you must implement it and see the results.
Which lens to use?
Short answer: Any lens. Using a mobile phone camera will produce semi-professional product photos if put in the hands of an expert photographer who takes advantage of lighting, chooses shooting angles, and product placement carefully. Also, any DSLR camera with a kit lens will get you impressive results if used intelligently. Of course, when you want to take your skill in product photography to the next level, some lenses will be better than others.
At first, it should be made clear that you do not need a full-frame camera to get high-quality product photos, the lighting conditions in the studio will be more than enough to use a camera with a crop sensor, also in most cases you will not need large-scale photo prints for products (unless you are doing billboard advertising, for example).
Prime lenses are much preferred over zoom lenses in product photography, they will give you sharper images, also, the photos will not suffer from defects or distortion as happens when using a zoom lens, on the other hand, you will not need a zoom lens as your subject won’t be far, and the distance between the camera and the subject will be fixed in most shots.
Having a macro lens in your product photography kit is not a bad idea, especially if you do a lot of small-sized products such as jewelry, watches, and small electronic gadgets. A macro lens allows you to get more details. You don’t need a macro lens with more than a 1:2 magnification ratio for product photography. Also, the working distance will not matter much because you will do mostly static camera shots, and most likely you will shoot in completely controllable lighting conditions. But having a lens with a larger working distance will not be bad.
Here at Photolet, we have a fully-equipped department for product photography, supervised by a group of professional photographers who specialize in product photography; we provide product photography services -no matter type or size- for online stores, restaurants, cafés and marketing agencies.
Accessories
There are a some very important accessories, and some less important, when it comes to product photography, here are the most important of these accessories in order from most important to least important:
- Tripod
A tripod is a must for product photography; it allows you to get a more stable photo, and most importantly, it helps you get consistent photos when you are required to shoot a large number of products for a single client. Holding the camera in the same position, maintaining the same shooting angle, and changing the product, will result in similar and consistent photos for all your products, which cannot be achieved by holding the camera with hands, without mentioning the effort you will make to hold the camera for a long period of time.
Any tripod will do the magic for you, but it is better to get an overhead tripod, so that you can use it to shoot products from above, or buy an overhead mount stand that you can use to convert any tripod into an overhead tripod. For example, this one will suit product photography very well:
- Backdrops
No product photography kit is complete without a variety of backdrops; From multi-colored paper backdrops, smart backdrops to curved panoramic backdrops (also known as cyclorama) as shown below. Backdrops don’t cost much, but they give you great flexibility to show off your subject in a stylish, professional way.
If you are on a budget, or you are shooting in multiple locations, then the photo light box is a very reasonable solution, it combines between backdrop and lighting, and it can be disassembled and easily carried anywhere. As mentioned below:
- Flash
If you are on a budget or don’t prefer to use separate light generators (for mobility reasons), then you will have to rely on the camera flash. The flash gives a decent results, but at a much lower cost, it is easier to carry, and gives you more flexibility in choosing shooting locations away from your studio. A combination of camera flash and natural light is probably more than enough to produce semi-professional product photos.
- Flash generator, softboxes and reflectors
If you have extra money to spend and want to make the most of your lighting, then the best investment is flash generators, softboxes and reflectors. These accessories take up a lot of studio space, and light generators and softboxes need a constant source of electricity (some battery-powered types are available recently). But they are necessary to obtain the best lighting conditions.
Lighting generators are a more professional alternative to camera flash to obtain a strong studio light that you can control independently of the camera (for back and side light), they are also tend to have more premium color characteristics, for example in color temperature and color rendering index, which are greatly affect the quality of the photos.
Standard product photography needs either to completely kill the shadows on the surface of the product, or to make them equally distributed, to achieve this, you will need a combination of softboxes and the light reflectors, you can use either a strip light softbox or a solid softbox (as in the image above), to obtain soft indirect lighting on different products (for example, strip light softboxes are the best for shooting glass bottles). Standard or v-flat reflectors are used to perfectly distribute or kill shadows as shown below, while black reflectors can also be used to absorb light and get more shadows, finally, silver reflectors are used to reflect the largest possible amount of light.
- Other important accessories
You can also get yourself a remote control for remote shutter release, without having to touch the camera itself. This will help you to take more stable shots. If your camera has built-in Wi-Fi, you will most likely be able to release the shutter remotely by installing an application on your phone.
It is also a good idea to have an air blaster and microfiber cleaning towels, to remove dust, impurities, fingerprints from the products. Remember that any tiny dust that may not be visible on the surface of the product will be magnified several times in the final photo due to strong lighting and zoom.
Also, to take fantastic and nontraditional photos, you may need to add some items to the frame, for example: colored balls, straws, small plants, flower petals, stones, wooden pieces.. etc. Having these items in the studio may be important to get such shots:
Finally, you may need clear strings, pins and mounts for hanging products; some products can only be shot while it is suspended in the air, to get their best shape. This is where you need to use your imagination to hang it and get the best results.
In conclusion, product photography may not be an artistic photography type, as you will not likely find photos of products at photography fairs and festivals, and product photographers do not attribute their images to them as other photography artists do. However, product photography remains a critical field that involves a lot of innovation and the use of new and nontraditional shooting techniques.