Search

3 tips to improve your home product photography

Michal
May 10, 2015
3 min read

Photographing your products, for online selling purposes, is really more like telling a story. Your customers are sitting in front of the computer screen or mobile device, and what you present to them, should be able to replace the physical shopping experience. Your customers cannot touch the product, try it on or move it towards the light and closely examine it. You should be able to answer all that for them. Make sure your photos convey each of your product’s characteristics - How does it feel? What is its size? How do you use it? Why is this product just perfect for your customers? Most importantly, make sure your photographs are beautiful, eye catching and interesting. The longer your customers spend looking at your photos, the higher the chance they will end up adding your product to their shopping cart.

Here are 3 tips, to make your own, home taken product photos, more beautiful and effective:

1. Use Natural light

Natural light, means – the sunlight, our only natural light source. Natural light has a softness about it that creates an emotional response and it's worth learning how to use it correctly, since it is the most available light source you can get. The sun will come up every morning (well… in most places :) )

Using natural light is a bit tricky, since it depends on the location of the sun. To get soft, defused light, you need the sun to be close to the earth, this happens twice each day, at sunrise and at sunset. So go outside and prefer early mornings and late afternoons for you photography sessions.

If you have to shoot at noon, when the light is harsh, shoot in the shade.

Taking your photographs on cloudy days is just wonderful! Clouds act as a huge light diffuser, softening the light even further. On cloudy days, just go out and spend the entire day taking photos.

Use a professional or homemade reflector, to double the amount of light and add more softness.

2. Use a tripod and self-timer

When the lighting situation is poor, which is often what you will encounter when shooting at the correct times of day (softness wise), it takes the camera a long time to “collect” the light and create a well-lit image. If you hold the camera in your hands during that time, your hand movements will affect the camera and your shot will become blurry.

Yes, your hands shake. Everybody’s hands shake, even if it is not visible to the naked eye.

To avoid this problem, place your camera on a tripod, the tripod will not shake; unless there’s an earthquake… so don’t shoot when there’s an earthquake, K? :)

Image courtesy of Keerati at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Also, activate the self-timer in your camera. The act of shooting, pressing the button, also shakes the camera; a self-timer delays the actual exposure operation in a few seconds, allowing the camera to stabilize before shooting. Every camera has a self-timer function. A 2-5 seconds delay is more than enough.

3. Over-expose when shooting with a white backdrop.

When you use a white backdrop, or a very light colored one, your camera will react to the amount of brightness and will darken up the image. You will get a grey background and a dark product.

Use the over exposure function to lighten up the shot, to get a nice white or light colored background and a well-lit product.

If you are shooting in a manual mode (M) – when setting up your exposure settings, look at your light meter. Instead of setting everything up to reach the “0” exposure, aim for the “+1”.

If you are shooting in any automatic or semi-automatic mode (Auto, P, Av/A, Tv/S and so on) – find your exposure setting function, usually it’s a button marked with [-/+], and increase the value from “0” to “+1”.

Remember that creating a bright, well-lit photo, is much simpler than increasing brightness using a photo editing software, the result looks much better and it is also much less time consuming.