Product Photography

Whether it’s online or at our local best buy product photographs can be found everywhere we look. A lot of times product photos can have a substantial impact on whether we would like to purchase that particular product or not. These commercial pictures which are meant to entice us surround us a lot more than we care to notice. From every product we buy at the super market, to the pictures above the stands of fast food restaurants.

To realize just how important product photography is, let’s take a look at the grand arena product photography, where different products battle it out for control - the supermarket. While there are more factors than just the product photo which contribute to your final decision over which product to buy, visual stimulation always was and always will be a very integral part of our decision making process, thus product photography come in.

Imagine yourself standing at the line of your favorite burger place. You’re standing in line as your eyes wander to an image of a nice juicy hamburger, with sauce dripping all over it as the light around it emphasizes the different colors and flavors, think how much you want that burger right now. Now imagine that instead of that image there would just be a sign that says “burger” with a price tag on it, now you better understand the power of product photography.

With this much affect on the average consumer no wonder big companies take their product photography very seriously. Some companies even hire teams of psychologists to analyze what would be the optimal way to present their product, so it’s no wonder this industry is doing so well.

these might help you out if you started taking commercial product photography or just need a few helpful reminders:

When shooting against a very light or white background, it’s very easy to get underexposed shady looking images. The easiest way to fix this is to change the “exposure value” of your camera, which in turn will make your image look brighter and crisper.

One of the more important things when shooting a product is focus - while most digital cameras nowadays do a fine job at auto focusing large objects, but when it comes down to smaller items they still seem to struggle, try to use spot focus for better results.

Using a tripod is a no brainer. Any little shake of the hand may reduce the quality of your final picture, not to mention the fact that you can set it exactly the way you want it, giving you an extra edge.

I would also recommend setting your camera to aperture priority mode and set it to the highest number possible, that way you'll get the largest possible area of your subject.

Soft lighting is another thing that’s crucial for your final result. Use either a light tent or a soft box to achieve this.

Finally you should always use a photo editing software for final retouching of your shot. While some photographers feel discouraged from using software to enhance their picture, the results could be amazing. Don’t feel like you need to spend a lot of money on expensive software, there are some cheap alternatives that won’t hurt your pocket all that much. Also don’t be afraid to dive in the photo editing world even if it’s your first time, the best and most important changes you can make with photo editing software are also the simplest and easiest to learn. With every image you take you should the edit the following until you get the best results possible: crop the image - take out anything distracting in the background which takes the focus of the image, also used to reduce image size. Adjust the exposure – if the adjustments you made with your camera weren’t enough. Sharpen the image – you can use the sharpen tool found in all photo editing software to give your image that crisp look. Lastly you can resize the image to a smaller size if you’d like, just remember two things when doing so:

1. Never enlarge your picture size. Doing so may severely hurt image quality

2. Don’t change the aspect ratio of your picture. Doing so may not only damage picture quality but may also create weird looking object which seem out of size.