As commercial advertising photographers in Glasgow, we are asked to photograph products for a wide range of clients but new businesses start ups always give us a little extra bit of job satisfaction.
Lindsay was one such client. Having recently been made redundant due to the Coronavirus crisis, she decided to embark on a new business and set up SpiraBobble selling a colourful range of traceless hair bobbles.
Like many new businesses who approach us, she’d tried doing it herself but wasn’t happy with the results.
Many of the bobbles were translucent which meant they had to be lit from behind to show the effect of the light coming through them.
We often see adverts popping up on Facebook for simple devices that claim to allow you to photograph products on a white background using your iPhone but product photography is never that simple.
It might work reasonably well for the few examples that are shown but product photography covers a huge range of potential products, all with different sizes, surfaces, materials and textures. Unfortunately, there isn’t a one size fits all solution.
We though it would be nice to have a random pile of the bobbles. The colours make this work really well.
One of the main challenges of Lindsay’s SpiraBobble products was that many of them were either transparent or translucent. This meant that they had to be lit from behind, something that can only be achieved using the right equipment. Without this, the products would appear opaque and you wouldn’t be able to see the effect of light shining through them.
Another challenge was that the shiny surface of the bobbles also meant that they reflected everything around them, so the lighting set up had to be carefully adjusted so unwanted reflections from the studio couldn’t be seen.
We had to photograph the whole range which was over 50 different colours.
The final thing which Lindsay needed for her new website www.spirabobble.co.uk were some creative shots of the bobbles; something which no YouTube or Facebook clip will tell you how to do, as it’s purely down to your experience and creativity as a photographer.
We wanted something simple and eye-catching which would work well as a website banner and also clearly convey what the product was, so we took some shots of the bobbles from above to create some patterns.
As well as being translucent, the hair bobbles also reflected the studio so we had to eliminate reflections as well.
Lindsay was delighted with the final product shots, which exceeded her expectations and it’s that part of helping someone set up their new business which provides that extra bit of job satisfaction.
One of the range of different group shots we took for advertising and social media.