Product Photography

Thumbing through a magazine you turn a page and there is a delicious looking sandwich, or a scrumptious looking seafood dinner. You find yourself practically tasting the food by simply looking at the photo. This is product photography. How many times have you searched for an item because it looked good or went to a certain restaurant because the advertisement was so well presented?

If a person is looking at a menu or a beautiful bottle of perfume the presentation can entice them to try the product, not the smell or the taste but the presentation. Presentation is everything. The product photographer presents your product in such a way that your client can taste it if it is food, smell it, if it is perfume, or hear the rustle of their silk dress before they have even tried it on.

Camera placing for product photography

Place your camera in spot focus mode when photographing small objects, basically allowing the object you are photographing to be in focus and everything else is maybe a little blurred. If you cannot get enough of a close up use extension tubes, but be careful this will give depth of field problems.

Use a Tripod in a product photography this is a must to curtail camera movement. The Tripod will make it possible for you to photograph at a slower shutter speed. You want to avoid anything that would cause the photograph to be anything but crystal clear. The closer you must photograph the more obvious motion blur will become. If you have access to a remote shutter release use of it, this way you will not need to touch the camera.

With product photography the aperture becomes extremely important, set your aperture to the highest number, do not use your internal flash, turn it off and use soft lighting or natural light. When you need to get a close up the aperture must be as small as possible.

Don’t forget the proper light

Once again, proper use of light is important in product photography. Using key, fill, and rim lighting techniques can be useful. Key lighting is used to give recognition to the object, but this is not enough, the object will not be truly defined. Now we add another effect the fill light to give light to the areas left in the shadow by the key light. The key light or main light is going to be brighter than the fill light which is secondary light. The rim light is placed behind an object just sweeping it at an angle; this light will be extremely bright. With darker objects this helps give definition to the product.

You might try using a 17-55mm or 24-70mm lens, this is digital. This professional zoom lens can be used for landscapes or close up shots, this helps a great deal with product photography. Weather can be a big factor on a product photography shoot, if the wind is up and you must do the shot outside the slightest movement can ruin the photo.

Editing software is very much a part of the process in product photography, and with a digital camera you can get information from the photo, this is a great asset. You can look at what was going on with your camera on a particular shot and use this information to make even better shots the next time.