Product Photography - The Process
Product Photography can represent a significant investment for a small or new business. If you haven’t been through the process before, it can also seem something of a mystery. How do you make sure the images your product photographer delivers show your product at its best? What about ensuring they align with your brand? Read on for a guide to the process behind a successful product shoot…
Commercial product photo of a rum bottle
Catalogue product photo of a stainless steel soap dish
Lifestyle product photo of a scented candle
Step 1 - Think About What You Need
The first and, in some ways, the most difficult part of the process. Often I’m given a product and told, “You’re the photographer, you’ll know what will look best for it.” While I always try to ensure the products I photograph always do look as good as possible, there’s an important difference between the way I would photograph something without any guidance, compared to the way I would do it if I had been asked to maximise its appeal to, say, young professional women.
As well as understanding your customers and their tastes, it’s important to establish whether you need the images to tie in with any specific style or mood. This can be as straightforward as fitting in with any existing images (such as in cases where a new product is being added to an existing line). Or it might be something less tangible, such as needing the photos to echo your brand ethos of sustainability and reliability.
There’s also the question of how the photos will be used. Are they solely for use on your own website, or do you need them for the product’s listing on Amazon or other ecommerce sites? Do they need to grab attention on social media, or work as a print advert in a magazine? The intended use(s) will influence factors such as whether the photos need to be landscape (wide) or portrait (tall), and whether they need to include copy space (empty regions where text can be added).
Examples of packshot photography, showcasing both a product and its packaging
Step 2 - Prepare a Brief
Again, if you’re not familiar with photography briefs, the idea of putting one together can seem daunting. It doesn’t have to be, though! If you’ve already completed Step 1 above, the brief is just a way of recording your ideas, so your photographer understands what your images need to do and how they need to look. You don’t usually need to go into too much detail (it’s called a brief for a reason!), but ideally should cover the following:
The general look required - preferred colour palette, style of photography, brand guidelines
How the photos will be used - web, ecommerce, print, social media
Any particular product details or functions that need to be highlighted
Number of photos required per product - e.g. is a single shot of the item enough, or will customers want to see front, side, back and top views?
Suggestions or requirements for any props or backgrounds/settings, where appropriate
Try to be as specific as possible. It’s also useful to have reference images or links to websites if you can find suitable photos online. Note that these don’t need to be pictures of the same type of product, but anything that demonstrates the kind of mood you’re looking to capture.
This photo is intended to show the various colours in which these scented candles are available. It’s also designed to work as a header image on the company’s website.
Step 3 - Pick Your Best Product(s)
Sometimes, if you’re trying to get photography done early on in the process of bringing a product to market, you might only have a prototype available. Although this isn’t necessarily a problem, it’s always best to photograph a product that’s effectively ready to be sent straight to a customer. This ensures the product photos show an authentic representation of what the customer will actually receive.
Things to avoid include damaged parts, wonky labels, any discolouration, missing pieces and anything else that might spoil the first impression a potential customer might have. It can be helpful to plan to include some spares, even if you only need one product in the photo. An example of this is in beverage photography, where a photo will commonly show an unopened bottle next to a filled glass.
This is also the point to gather up any props, if you are supplying some or all of them for the shoot. Don’t forget to ensure that any assembly or operating instructions necessary to get the required photos are included, too.
A set of product photos for a beverage brand, demonstrating their bottle and can options. The photos are intended to look distinct from one another, but share a “family resemblance” by way of a consistent style.
Step 4 - The Photoshoot
This is the easy bit. Once the products have arrived, your photographer will set up the studio and take photos, referring to the brief as they go.
Depending on the project, I’ll sometimes send a sample shot or two just to check I’m on the right track. Likewise, if an idea occurs to me while I’m shooting the product that I think will work well, I’ll get in touch to check whether that’s something you’d like to proceed with. So, ideally, don’t schedule a shoot while you’re away on holiday and unreachable!
Images from a photoshoot for an iron firepit, shot on location in a DIY store in Leamington Spa and including standard, detail, and lifestyle views of the product
Step 5 - Post-Processing and Selection
After the shoot, the photographer will remove test shots and any photos that haven’t quite worked out. The remainder will then be processed ready for review. Personally, I tend to make the first round of adjustments — correcting the colours where necessary, brightening or darkening regions of the photo, cropping and straightening — before sending the photos to the client. Typically, I’ll use an online gallery, where the client can view the photos and choose the ones they would like in the final selection. This is prior to any retouching, so the photos aren’t finished at this point. Although this means the client sometimes has to use their imagination in terms of what the photo will look like when support wires and the like are removed, it’s more efficient to do it this way than to complete a full edit on each photo.
“Levitating” product photos always require editing to remove wires and other support structures.
Step 6 - Final Edit and Delivery
Once the client’s selection is confirmed, the polishing process begins. This is where the photos really begin to shine, and the product is made to look its absolute best. Each project is different, so there’s not a fixed set of steps to work through, but the end result is a set of photos ready for use. That might simply mean all the selected photos edited and supplied in high resolution files, but it may include sets of images with specific crops, different resolutions to suit social media or website use, or alternative edits (for example, with a different background colour). Again, this is all determined by the brief.
Then it’s over to you, to make the most of the photos in whatever way you’ve intended. But of course, that’s hopefully not the end of our interaction, as I’ll be on hand for any follow-up images you need, whether that’s for new product launches or fresh marketing content, to help boost customer engagement and supercharge sales.
Ready to book a Product Photography Session, or want to find out more? Please get in touch!
