How Do I Stage My Product?

Cabin Decor

You have a great product and you’ve got your product on white shots, but you need that one great shot-often referred to as a “hero” shot for your Amazon product page. Even with minimal equipment you can maximize your composition to stage your product.

This rustic cabin decor lamp with painted shade and metal art; and small wood carvings against a tongue and groove wood wall serves as the canvas to creating more dramatic photography.  This is your stage and these are the basic elements to arrange as you look for the shot you’re after.  This isn’t about being quick-it takes time and a lot of shots.  Beyond arranging what you see through the lens you’ll change up the shutter speed and focal length for a wide range of variables to find that end shot.

Cabin Decorating Theme
Turns out less is more.Rustic Cabin Hallway
Adding a floral stem to the very foreground adds shadow and depth. The focus is clearly on the cabin lamp with the floral having the bokeh. This is using a very slow shutter speed and wide open aperture (2.8).

Bokeh
Here the focus is reversed-bringing the floral into focus maintaining the same slow shutter speed and aperture. This might work for a backdrop image for marketing text while you still display your product.

Cabin Rustic Decor
The experimenting continues, same lens settings, but rearranging the floral, playing with the light.  This, too, can be a nice backdrop drawing the eye to the foreground where you might add your marketing message for a website slider.

Rustic Cabin Decor on Tongue and Groove paneling

Then often you come full circle to include parts of several variations of your composition. This used the same settings, pulled in the wood carvings and feathered the floral to a wider angle for a beautifully balanced and bokehed rustic cabin decor photograph.  This gives a lovely staging while highlighting the lamp and giving a vision of how it will look and feeling it creates once brought into the buyer’s home.

Canon Lens EF70-200mm f/2.8L USM
Slow Exposure 0.3 seconds
Rotolight to spot

Product on Black Acrylic

Product on Black Acrylic Staged

This innovative speaker design offers stunning sound.  The product photography needed to reflect the mood.

The photographer used two Arri 650T fresnel lights with 300 watt bulbs and two Matthews 48″ x 48″ artificial silk scrims, 1.6 stops.  Also used a Rotolight NEO matching the Arri tungsten temperature for the top of the speaker.
Canon 5D MarkIII
Canon 100mm 2.8 macro lens

We used a sheet of black acrylic to create a classic look.  There is nothing in the background, but shooting at a 9.0 aperture kept the product in sharp focus while turning the background completely black. This shot is straight out of the camera, no Photoshop adjustments or editing.

Speaker on Black

Simple Product Staging on Black Acrylic

The designer requested a size perspective so we added wine glasses for a simple staged product image.

Flat Lay Product Photographer in Orange County

Flat Lay Product

For flat lay product photography an overhead camera rigging system with an HD monitor gives the Macro lens the flat, level shooting plane for tack sharp focus.  We lit using 2 soft boxes and a quarter stop 48 inch scrim with a 3rd flash behind.

Sequined Bikini Product Photorgapher

The sequins took a bit of light modifying, to maintain the jewel tones without blowing them out. We used foam core to create a box to channel the light.

Swimsuit Photographer

Flat lay product photography requires one essential tool for setup: pins.  Lots of pins, lots of foam-core layers and additional time.  Spandex can be a bit of a wrestle due to the elasticity, but pinning does the trick.

Service Truck on White

Service Truck on White

What to do with your service truck photo?  You spent a great deal of thought and cost in creating your moving billboard – the photo turned out great, next?  A slick, clean extraction of your service vehicle is a great advertising tool.  You can create beautiful ads by lay text over the image, or drop it into any kind of background.  It all begins with getting a properly lit photo.  The “magic” lies in the planning.  The extraction yields an image easily manipulated in many creative ways. Read more about website photography.

Commercial Facility Photography

Industrial Warehouse Photography
Your typical three story industrial distribution warehouse building. Getting the exterior shot was the simplest part of this job, but the client installed a massive air conditioning system and wanted to capture the expanse of this project.

Distribution Warehouse Photographer
These air conditioning ducts are massive. This ended up being a pretty shot – architecturally speaking.Commercial Photographer
You can’t get this with your iPhone. Critical to my client were shots of the air ducts – which were 3 stories up, no ladder or lift system to get me close, and these ceilings were 80% dark.  The crew was laying in the ceiling panels as I worked staying ahead of them before the window to shoot was gone.  I used a 35 mm lens and metered for the darkness to achieve the results above.

White Background for Product Images

The explosion of Amazon as a marketplace has sent many sellers scrambling to meet the  “on white background” standard set for Amazon sellers. It can be frustrating because Amazon defines on-white as in RGB color 255, 255, 255.  The slightest off shade results in non-compliance.

There are two ways to achieve this pure white.  The best quality is to shoot the product on white and truly have it ON white, properly lit. Like this:

shoe product on white background

But what if your product is white?  If you try to shoot white on white (pure white) without professional setup equipment you’ll end up with little definition to your product.  There are techniques used by photographers one of which is using acrylic to give a suspended look to the product and flooding it with light resulting is a rich depth of white – on white.  Notice the sheen, the fibers of the nylon straps and the full out line of each product.  Like this:
White on White Product Photography

The other method of achieving a pure white background is using Photoshop to extract the product.  If you begin with a properly well-lit product and know you will finish the work in Photoshop this can result in getting more shots taken in your session time.  It’s a discussion to have with your client.  Extraction works for products with defined lines – fuzzy slippers will be more time consuming to extract.  As a photographer you need to budget your time, or you will spend more time in Photoshop than if you had properly lit the product to begin with. Bottom line: get a the best image with your camera and you can save time OR do the most in Photoshop.
T-shirts Extracted for White Background

Why hire a professional photographer?

It’s tempting to pick up your cell and begin snapping photos of your business for your website.  Ten years ago this was acceptable for websites, but the internet is now a far more polished place and website visitors have a higher expectation of quality.

As a professional in your own business you understand the knowledge and experience it takes to deliver the quality service or products you sell.  When it comes to photographing your business, staff portraits or product photography you want a professional to deliver outstanding images to promote your business.  To expect your employees to be able to deliver images that a professional can is unrealistic.  There is a huge difference between a hobbyist and a professional.

A pro photographer uses professional cameras, lighting, backdrops and knows ways to manipulate light to capture the best photo of your products, facility or personnel.  A professional photographer will get to know your business and match the look and feel of your branding.  He’ll have suggestions for the best shots and composition bringing a creative artistic eye to your project.  Taking your vision of a project and delivering eye-catching photographs.

Most photos benefit from processing – however minimal a professional photographer’s eye preparing the images ensures superior quality. Take your business project to the next level use a professional for professional results.

catalog photography

White Balance for Business

Commercial Photography

There were no interior lights turned on in this airplane hangar.  I chose to open the hangar door behind us and use the natural light from the skylight.  When I turned around to shoot the airplane (below), I changed the white balance temperature to 3350 to get this blue water look. View more business photography.

Airplane Hangar Photography

Commercial Photographer

Commercial photographers have more creativity than you think.  It’s about manipulating the elements.  This is an exciting dramatic photo using only one light.

commercial photography

Arri Fresnel 650 with a 300 watt bulb
Using a plastic diffusion sheet background called translum made by Savage paper.
Lens EF70-200mm f/2.8L USM
ISO Speed 125
White Balance Mode Color Temperature(9900K)
Av( Aperture Value ) 16.0
Tv( Shutter Speed ) 0.3

Business owners need original photos for their marketing.  So many clients have been exasperated feeling they have nothing worth photographing, particularly when their business is service oriented or their tools are not flashy and exciting.  As a commercial photographer it’s my challenge to find interesting composition in the ordinary.  This turns an ordinary table top photo into a dazzling advertisement image.

Alternative to Stock Photography

Now that Google is looking less favorably on stock photography you’ll be looking at options for original photos for your website. If your business produces products you’ll find this an easier solution. But when you provide services it can be more challenging to find ways to compose photos to represent your services.

alternative to stock photography

composite photography

photography for services