Great looking product photography for online sellers

Many, many products are being sold online these days.  And why not?  It makes sense – if you are a small business you can greatly reduce your overheads and increase your profit margins.  Work from home, work around the family, reach more people.

There is a challenge though in communicating the value and benefits of your product to your customer.  Are there others out there selling the same product?  How do you make yours look better?

Having great photographs of your product is one of the key factors to getting great sales.  You may well find that it is worth more than your time and effort (and frustration) is, to employ a professional photographer for your product shots.  If competition is high, you will most certainly benefit from having the best possible product photographs.

Great images let your customer know that you are professional and take pride in your business, and that you are reliable with good quality products.

Have you tried photographing your products yourself?  How did it go?

Getting a nice crisp, white background is not as easy as you might think.  See this example of the same jewellery product photographed by the seller and then a professional photographer.  Which one would you prefer to buy?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are taking the photos yourself, you will need some extra equipment.  The set-up for the second image above involved 3 camera flashes that were triggered with a remote trigger so that they all go off together.  You can purchase the radio remotes from a camera store.  Two of the flash units were set up in front of the product and at 45 degrees and the third was set up to fire in the direction behind the product.

The product itself was sitting on a white perspex sheet which was curved, so that the light didin’t “fall away” at the back and create a grey background.  The reflection in the perspex is a nice effect also.  I purchased the perspex sheet from a hardware supplies store.

You will need to set up the camera on a tripod, and have your camera settings set to the slowest possible shutter speed and smallest aperture, so that you get maximum “depth of field” or amount of the product in focus.

As you can see from the next set of images, it does help to have a creative eye as well.  Here again, the first 2 images were taken by the seller and the others are mine.

If you would like to inquire about product photography costs please feel free to contact me.  Turnaround time for your images can be as little as 2 days.