If you are selling products you will almost certainly want photos of them to use on your website, social media and other promotional materials. Here are my six tips to help you get better product shots:
1: Capture the Emotion. That might sound a bit odd if you are selling something that is lifeless like nuts and bolts. However you need to get across the benefit your product will give and provoke an emotional response from your prospective buyer. So think about how your customer should feel. If it is really nuts and bolts you might want to give a feeling of reliability, quality, ease of use or perhaps a useful application (i.e product in situ).
2. Capture the Product’s Unique Selling Point. You should be doing this in most of your marketing collateral so you also need to be doing this in the photograph of the product. For example if you sell waterproof light fittings, then you could take a photograph of the product underwater.
3. Capture the Synergy between the Product and your Business. You will already be promoting your business and its core strengths and values. For example if you are a food product manufacturer who only uses locally sourced ingredients then you want to make a local connection in your product photography. You could use a well-known local landmark in the background. If you are making pet products then a shot including a pet is an obvious option
4. Use an appropriate background For most product shots a plain background works well. Choose a colour that matches the design of your website. Colour wheels can be a big help showing you which colours contrast and which work well together Adobe has a great tool on its website for this which you can find here
5. Use an Application photo. To show the benefits of your product an application photo can work better than just a close-up of the product. Before and after photos demonstrate benefits much better than simple shots showing product features. Below are before and after shots of a street lighting installation. You can clearly see how the new product improves visibility and the safety of this stretch of road.
6. Follow the rules of Composition. There a few fundamental rules that you should follow, one of the most useful is the rule of thirds. You will need to position your product in the frame so that it is on one of the “third” lines and where possible on an intersection. You can find more detail about composition in a previous blog post here ( see section 1).
If you haven’t the time or inclination to do this for yourself you can also give me call on 07557 780336 or send me an email (richard@great-impressions.com) and we can discuss how I can help show off your product at its best.