Can You Fake Your Own Product Photography Studio In House?

Do you really need a product photography studio, or can you get away with photographing your products in house? If you look at the average sort of price charged by a commercial advertising photographer you'll almost certainly be tempted to consider avoiding having to rely on a fully equipped product photography studio, instead using lower grade equipment, and hoping that a few key techniques will get you by.

It's understandable since at the moment almost all small and medium sized businesses are looking to make cuts wherever possible. Sadly many photographic studios seem unwilling to help smaller businesses keep up with the big businesses, pricing themselves out of the market in many cases. It should be noted though that this isn't always the case, and if you're prepared to look about there are a few photography studios offering lower priced deals for small and medium sized businesses.

But is even that expensive fully justified, if it really is possible instead to take your product photographs in house? Certainly it's relatively easy these days to pick up a pretty decent digital camera in any high street store. With even mobile phones now able to take the same sort of quality image of a decent digital camera a few years ago, the quality of the image is likely to be very good if you're prepared to spend over £300 at least. But you shouldn't just be budgeting for the camera, because there are many other camera equipment items besides the camera itself which will be necessary.

Thinking small and simple to begin with, you'll certainly need a tripod in order to make sure the camera is stable and lined up correctly. But if you hook a camera to a tripod, no matter how careful you are there is often a slight bit of movement once you press the shutter button. This is why it's often a good idea to have a remote shutter button on a lead, so that you can trigger the camera without nudging it, even slightly.

Then of course there's the lighting. Don't think for one moment that the built in flash on even a good camera will be good enough. In fact you needn't even consider the flash as usable on most digital cameras. You'll need to look at an external flash or lighting system, and this will of course need to be hooked in to the remote trigger. Different products will require different lighting solutions. A fully equipped product photography studio will have a whole range of lighting solutions, including soft lighting, hard lighting, coloured lighting and even LED lighting.

But then again, lighting is not just about lights, because sometimes it will be necessary to diffuse the light, or even have it reflect in different ways for a clearer result. This is where reflector boards, panels and umbrellas will be helpful, creating the sort of diffused lighting which allows products to be seen clearly, as they would in optimum daylight, without lights creating or exacerbating shadows and contrast. Another issue you'll find with taking product photographs in house is that you'll be unable to remove the backgrounds very easily. You can tell at a glance when a product photograph has been taken in house, 'on the cheap', because you can see the background - often just a sheet hung over something.

A professional product photography studio will usually have what is called an infinity cove, which is a specially designed room or space which has no corners or edges, and therefore nothing to suggest that there is any background at all. Products can be photographed in front of this, and will stand out clearly, and can even be cut out from the backgrounds and superimposed on alternative backgrounds. This is just the starting point for creating decent photographic images, although there's a great deal more besides these first few tips. If you're looking to save money, you really are best off looking for a product photography studio which specialises in offering service which are affordable for small and medium sized businesses.

If you're looking for a professional product photography studio which offers affordable services with a professional commercial advertising photographer then visit The Packshot People.

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Commercial Product Photography - Turning Passport Photos Into The Mona Lisa

Believe it or not, commercial product photography is actually a good deal more complex than simply propping a product up against a sheet, pointing a camera and pressing a button. In fact, product photography is both an art and a science, requiring ingenuity and imagination, scientific know how and cutting edge technology.

Of course, that's not to say that you can't just prop a product up against a sheet or stand it on your desk, point a camera at it and press the button. Obviously both approaches will result in you having a photograph of your product. But don't mistake a photograph of a product with product photography. They may sound the same, but they have about as much in common with each other as your most recent passport photo and the Mona Lisa. The difference between those two is likely to be that your passport photo is a reasonably accurate, albeit unflattering image of what you actually look like, with no help whatsoever. The Mona Lisa is an artistic interpretation full of imagination, creativity and interest. Which is likely to attract more attention when hung in a gallery? If both images were available as postcards, which would sell better?

If you're still thinking that your passport photo has a pretty good shot, then either you are the reincarnation of Ms Lisa herself, or your ego is so big you can't see past it to the delusions beyond! No doubt you can start to see the difference between merely taking a fairly honest but unflattering photograph of a product, and using commercial product photography experts to create an image which is likely to catch people's attention, and encourage them to buy the product, or at least to find out more.

There are many techniques used by advertising photography studios, and of course a good deal of state of the art equipment too. Naturally it helps if you have access to a huge studio, infinity cove and an abundance of lights and lighting rigs, as well as cutting edge digital cameras and powerful photo editing software. But this alone won't convert your product photograph into the Mona Lisa. After all, you can sit inside a Formula 1 racing car, with some of the world's leading racing car technology at your fingertips, but that won't necessarily mean you'll win, or even come close, or even finish at all!

Technology is one part of the equation, but it's not the most important part. That lies in the heads of commercial product photographers, who know not only how to use that technology to best effect, but also how to create an image which sells. Sometimes it can seem that a product really is just a product. But you have to make people stop, take a look at the item, instantly see themselves holding it, or using it, and wanting to find out more.

If you can get people to imagine using the product, or even just holding it, then you've achieved a huge step, because once we have that virtual kinaesthetic experience of holding or using the product, it not only becomes more real, but our ownership of it becomes more real in our minds, greatly increasing the likelihood of us being prepared to take the next step and make the ownership real.

If you're running a small or medium size business and you're looking at creating some product photographs, then don't imagine that publishing their passport photographs will get people running in your direction. Sometimes it pays to get the job done properly, and in the case of commercial product photography it's more of an investment than an expense, and much more of a certainty than a gamble.

If you'd like to find out more about how commercial product photography can help your business, talk to The Packshot People, who can offer very affordable advertising photography services for small and medium sized businesses.

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Two Tricks Of The Trade Used By Product Photographers

Experienced professional product photographers have a whole range of tips and tricks they use every day to achieve the sort of end results which not only look incredibly simple to reproduce, but which actually get the job done of making people want to buy the product. Often it's those photographs which look straightforward and relatively simple which require the most amount of work, planning and preparation. It's only when you try to recreate those sorts of images yourself that you start to realise that there really is much more to professional product photography than meets the eye, or even the lens.

For example, you may have a product which you want to display standing up, such as an iPhone for example. Having it flat on the table makes it look less real, and so you think, almost certainly correctly, that by having the product standing up it looks more three dimensional, more real and therefore more tangible and appealing.

But if you have ever tried standing an iPhone or other thin, curved item up you'll have noticed that it's very hard. You might try something like Blu-Tac or plastecine, but you can't really get it to stand up straight unless you wedge the product in a ball of it, but then of course this is then very obvious.

In some cases you'll find that the product can't even be supported from behind very well because it's either transparent, meshed or very intricate. The answer in many cases is actually to use fishing line or the cotton thread that's being sold as 'colour matching' because it's actually transparent. By attaching one end of this to the back of the iPhone with BluTak, or tying it around a part of the product, you can have the product standing up, or even leaning at angle. Of course, you'll also have the thread visible, which is where clever post production work comes in. Using sophisticated photo editing techniques it is possible to completely remove the line, even from fairly complicated and busy backgrounds, making it look as though the product is standing up all by itself, seemingly defying gravity.

But this is only one problem that needs to be overcome, and there are plenty more. For example, you may assume that a bottle of shampoo is fairly easy to photograph, until you realise that the bottle is made from a black plastic material and the cap is made from a shiny chrome material. How do you light the product up so that the black bottle is not so dark that it looks flat and unappealing, without making the chrome top shine so brightly it's barely visible at all? If you try photographing such a product it seems that you either have to accept that the bottle will be too dark or the cap too light, but not both at the same time.

Some professional product photographers may be able to create a lighting rig that's finely detailed enough to be able to focus the light or diffuse the light in the right way to overcome this problem but there's another solution that can be achieved even more quickly in post production. By taking at least two photographs of the product, one overexposed so that the black bottle comes out clearly and one underexposed so that the cap looks detailed, it is possible to then blend these twp images together, transferring the cap from the slightly darker image to the over exposed one, creating a photograph which ensures that every part of the product is correctly lit, detailed and appealing.

An iPhone and a bottle of shampoo are hardly unusual products, which gives you just a flavour of the many thousands of tips and tricks which product photographers are using everyday to fool us into seeing the impossible.

If your business could do with the help of professional product photographers then visit The Packshot People for affordable advertising photographers offering low priced photography services to small and medium businesses.

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Why Does So Much Product Photography Fail?

There are countless small and even medium sized businesses struggling to make their mark largely because their advertising photography is simply not achieving much. In some cases it may be achieving nothing at all, and in plenty of cases it is clear to see that the company's product photography is actually having a negative effect on sales.

It's easy to see the product photograph as simply being an added extra, attached to an advert, flyer, web page or other marketing material simply to add a little colour and appeal. But the truth is that the overwhelming majority of people take one look at the photograph before reading any of the text, and then make a snap judgement not just about the product, but about the company itself, based on the quality of the product photograph. That's not the product they're judging - just the photograph.

Because often it is the quality of the picture which gives people the best clue as to the amount of care and attention the company gives to everything else. We've all got good quality digital cameras at home. Photography isn't the privilege of the few - high quality photographic imaging is in everyone's hands, and as a result we've become even better at making judgements very quickly about images used in advertising. A photograph that's little better than the sort of quality we might be expected to achieve on a family holiday is not going to achieve much in the eyes of most people.

In fact on many cases the product photograph isn't even looked at, because sub consciously we've already evaluated it out of the corner of our eye and made a judgement about it that it's either not good quality, or not meant for us. It's crucial therefore to think about how to make sure that product photography is able to achieve several key things. Firstly it must jump out at people and make it itself noticed. This doesn't just mean using bright colours, lurid backgrounds, supersized images or other gimmicks. Often quality will stand out all by itself, without recourse to gimmicks and tasteless trickery.

The second thing it should achieve it to make itself appear relevant to the consumer. For example, if you have two mobile phones, one of which is full of social networking tools, games, video camera and tools and features ideal for teenagers, and you have another phone with a built in 'Qwerty' keyboard, video conferencing facilities, management software and easy PC integration ideal for business people, it makes sense that the advertising photography needs to take these two different audiences into consideration. For teenagers the photograph is likely to include images or graphics which suggest movement, connectivity, excitement, fun and energy, whereas the product photograph of the other phone may offer a crisper, cleaner, more organised impression.

Once you've grabbed people's attention and made it clear that the product photograph is relevant it's then also important to achieve three more things. Firstly you need to be able to provide an unequivocally good quality image. This means that the quality of the product is clear enough that it will easily be recognised if seen in real life, and that people can see clearly aspects of the product which will be of interest and relevance. The next thing it will need to achieve is to communicate to the customer that the product and the company is about quality, and about standing out, being unique and being better than alternatives.

Finally product photography needs to engage the consumer by creating an emotive bond. The image should excite, enthuse, intrigue or otherwise actively engage the consumer so that they start to already imagine using it, having it and being seen with it, without really thinking consciously about it. That's a lot to ask from a photograph, but if you don't ask it, you won't get it and if you don't get it you won't get the sales you deserve either.

For very affordable, high quality product photography contact The Packshot People, experts in advertising photography that sells.

http://EzineArticles.com/6506641