The design and appearance of your e-commerce store play a very important role in ensuring that it is up-to-date and appears the way you want it to. After years of experience in capturing product photographs, I realized in the e-commerce industry, customer expectations are continually changing due to new technological advancements.
Photographers play an important role in marketing e-commerce products to bring in more customers daily, raising the e-commerce store’s business.
It’s not only the e-commerce stores benefiting from this relationship. Instead, even I had made millions of dollars last year by capturing convincing and lead-generating photographs of the products.
Are you also seeking a money-making career in Ecommerce product photography?
Believe it, you have chosen the perfect career, but don’t be fooled by the thought that taking photographs of products is easy. You need to learn professional skills before taking your first selling photograph of a product.
Don’t worry because we will teach you everything about capturing mind-blowing product photographs from the basic to the expert level. Ready? Let’s start.
What Is Ecommerce Product Photography?
E-commerce product photography includes photographing the products of an e-commerce store to present their details to the customers. The purpose is to convince the buyers to take quick action and place the order. So you can say that e-commerce product photography is a commercial way of producing high-quality photographs of the products to attract more customers.
For your excitement, you need to know that the commercial photography industry in 2018 reached a total of 1.8 billion in revenue. Where the average employee was earning 42.5k. The expected count for 2023 is way more than this. Then why not adopt this profession and make millions per year?
Read More > How to Do Clothing Photography for Your Online Business?
Step-By-Step Guide To Shoot Ecommerce Product Photographs
Excited to take some amazing e-commerce product photographs to convince customers to buy the product immediately? The following steps are the essence of my years of experience in shooting product photographs.
Step 1: Cleaning and Organizing The Product
I always decide to photograph a single product, sometimes also. I usually collect all the products in one place I will be shooting. This helps me organize them depending on the category. I pick one product at a time and photograph it easily.
When you are photographing highly detailed photographs, it is very important that your product is completely clean with not even a single dust particle. The cleaner your product will be, the better you can capture the photographs.
Step 2: Preparing The Shooting Space
I always knew that shooting space was my magic castle because that was the place where I took numerous wonderful product photographs. Keeping my shooting space simple Is the best day from my side. To create a new shooting space, you need the following important things:
- High-quality Camera( Canon EOS M50 Mark II like mine that works just awesome)
- A stable base
- Desk to shoot the photographs ( it can be an old wooden desk because you will add your desired background on it, so it doesn’t matter about how the table should look)
- Backdrop (I prefer to use a white one as it enhances the details of the product).
- Lighting (You can use both artificial and natural.)
Step 3: Adjust The Camera Settings
I tried on with different cameras, including Nikon D850, Sony a7R 11, and even a mobile camera, and guess what? I always have the best quality images.
Surprised how?
Because I have always focused on the settings of my camera, keep in mind that the quality of the camera can not get you amazing product photographs until you make professional settings. You can use the below-mentioned settings that I have used every time while capturing the photographs.
(i) Set the ISO to 100 or below 100, as it gives the ideal depth required for capturing a product.
(ii) Set the high shutter speed if you want to avoid the blurriness from your pictures just like I want.
(iii) I will advise you not to try to adjust the white balance yourself. Using the automatic mode is the best hit.
Step 4: Place The Tripod/Monopod
I never photographed e-commerce products without a tripod or monopod because stability matters in product photography. To capture the photographs of the products for your clients like a pro, you can follow my steps to get the best results.
(i) Fix the camera on the tripod. Place the product on the shooting desk and bring the tripod in front of the table.
(ii) Adjust the position of the product according to the focal point of the camera. I suggest adding any props as I believe they help to enhance the product’s value more than anything else.
(iii) I place the side lights beside the product to add as much light as possible to the product.
(iv) The best trick I always follow is placing a reflector on the opposite side of the light, especially when I use natural light. This helps to enhance the value of the product.
Step 5: Use Appropriate Lighting
Imagine how it will feel to photograph a product in the dark? Absolutely stupid, right? That’s why using the proper lighting and placing it in the right location is highly important.
The biggest question is which light you should choose to get the best results.
You can get a soft light kit like the ESSDI Lighting Kit if you are on a budget. Natural light is another good light source perfect for capturing shining photographs of the product.
When I shoot the photographs with natural light, I place the shooting table near the window and try to complete my shooting during the daytime because as the day progresses, there is a decrease in the amount of light.
If you are not using natural light, then your best tip is to place the product near the lighting source keeping the light toward the back of the shooting table. This helps to add more lighting in your photograph, avoiding any dark shadows raining on your picture.
Step 6: Start Shooting The Photographs
Now you are all set to start taking the photographs so that you can provide them to your client. Once you are done capturing the photographs, be sure to check each one if it still has any flaws.
You can use softwares like Photoshop to edit the images. As this helps me to reduce the flaws in my product photographs because I always want to be on top, providing the best quality product photographs to my client. And I will advise you to do the same.
How To Market Ecommerce Product Photography
Marketing e-commerce product photographs is compulsory because you need to show the photographs to more people to get more clients. I usually share my client’s website’s link containing my photographed images, as this increases the authenticity of my work, bringing more customers.
You can create your own portfolio website that discusses your expertise and past experiences so more people can get in touch with you to have the product images. Pinterest and Instagram are other good ways to market your content.
Ecommerce Product Photography Pricing
Ecommerce photography cost greatly depends on different factors like the size of the product, the type of images required, how much editing is needed, and how professional you are as a photographer. However, I charge between $20 to $200 per photograph, depending on the client’s requirements.
It’s your choice and the consequences, based on whom you can charge more or less from a client to photograph the products. Instead of charging for a single photograph, you can also set a complete project price. This is mostly applicable when your client needs more photographs of the same or different products, as it helps to set the price better.
People Also Ask
01: What is the most common product photography mistake?
One of the most common mistakes is to start working directly on the photographs without creating a complete plan for the project. You must write down everything related to your project on paper and then set the appropriate criteria.
02: What is the procedure for photographing products?
Prepare the equipment and the product that you need to photograph, adjust camera settings additionally with the adjustment of the relatable background, and there you go. Start taking photographs.
03: What’s the best tip to optimize product images for more reach?
To optimize product photographs, you need to focus on these:
- Adding bigger images slows the website, and a slow website ultimately decreases the customer count.
- Better to use small-size images that do not slow the website, exciting the customer with fast-loading photographs.
Final Words
E-commerce product photography is increasing every year, raising the opportunities for new photographers hoping to make a good living from photographing products. With the understanding of the digitalization of the world, more and more people are starting their e-commerce businesses.
This means that more people need photographers to capture attractive and convincing photographs of the products to increase sales.
Do you also want to become the best e-commerce product photographer?
For that you need to learn my important tips and tricks to convince the viewers in a better way to buy more products from your clients. I hope this article was well explanatory about capturing e-commerce product photographs. Now you can get your first client after practicing the tips described above.
Let us know in the comments below if our article was helpful for you as a beginner and professional and what we should add to provide more value to newbie photographers like you.