Do you have your own business? It’s a tough racket, not only do you have to be an expert in your industry but you have to be a web developer and a graphic designer and a photographer too! Well, I am here to help take the pressure off in one of those departments.
Product photography can be a bit daunting for beginners but the ideas behind getting a great image are simple. Once you master the basic ideas behind shooting products you can build on them and take some really beautiful composites with catchlights and snoots and all that fancy stuff.
Frame Your Product
First, you need to frame your object carefully. This is the first idea because it's the most fundamental to take great images. You can experiment and play around and outright screw up the other ideas here and still get a pretty good end result. You want to frame the object in a dynamic way to properly display it to the customer. For example, you wouldn’t want to just lay a pair of headphones on a desk, you’re going to want to stand them up, show the drivers, make sure the logo is in full view. Once you have your product situated then you can move on to lighting.
Perfect Your Lighting
Secondly, you’re going to want to take that last idea and apply it to lighting. You want to display the object in all its glory and you want your light to enhance the framing you did before. The simplest way to do this is to use a soft light that won't create harsh shadows that create unwanted lines or mask parts of the object you want to show. I’ll go more into the different qualities of light and how you can use them for different effects in an upcoming blog but for now, let’s go simple. Stick with the soft even lighting, try to eliminate any harsh shadows.
Get Your Background Just Right
Next, we want to light the background in a way that will create a separation from the object. Too many times when people are taking pictures they ignore the background. A busy background can distract the viewer from the subject of the photo in this case it’s our product. So the easiest way to do that is to shoot our product on a white background with a light dedicated solely to that background. You can do without this step as you can just edit out the background in editing, which I will go into more detail on in a future blog editing product photography.
Shoot & Edit
All that's left is to shoot it and edit it and as long as you keep these basic ideas in mind you’re on the right track to shooting great product photography. Of course, you could always just leave it to the pros like us here at Photography by Misty. That's a totally valid option.
Capturing Professional Branding and Product Photography in Dallas, Plano, Frisco, Fort Worth, and surrounding Texas areas.
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