Working as product photographers in Glasgow, one of the most common set ups we use for product photography is against a white background. As a style, it’s nice and clean, generally shows off a product well and looks good in the majority of websites, especially for e-commerce.
When we are quoting for product photography, we often start by saying the simplest and cheapest option is to take shots against a plain white background. To a certain extent that’s true. You don’t have backgrounds and props to worry about which take extra time to source and set up. Also, once the studio lighting is set up, you can often keep using the same set up for multiple products but it isn’t quite as simple as it sounds.
Although they look very simple, group shots always take a lot more time to carefully arrange. It iOS also crucial that the spacing between the products is even.
We recently had an email from a company based in Glasgow who didn’t want to pay a photographer but were asking if we could train them in how to photograph their own products. They had a set up consisting of a DSLR camera, a white background and one light with a brolly. If only it were that simple! Of course you could take a product photographs like that using that set up but it would look really bad, probably on a par with what an amateur would do to sell something on Ebay.
We left more space around this product so you could see it was smaller in comparison to the other products.
The set up we use at our Glasgow studio is a lot more sophisticated. As a starting point, we often use a light tent which cuts out unwanted reflections in the product, so all you can see is the product itself without it reflecting the studio in front of it. So far, so good but just throwing a product into a light tent doesn’t make for great product photographs. Even within that environment you still need to control the lighting. With this set up we actually use between 4 and 5 studio lights. 2 for the background to render it an even white, 2 to the left and right to illuminate the front of the product and create some modelling and sometimes another above. All the need to be fine tuned for the best position.
We had to introduce some subtle shading at the side of the bottle so it would stand out against the white background.
With the CBD products shown here, we also had an issue with the white bottles and labels disappearing against the white background so we also introduced some shading to help them stand out.
It was important to have a little catchlight on the black dropper so it appeared three dimensional rather than just flat.
Finished? Not quite. Even after all that there was some retouching to do. As standard, we will remove any dust or marks that appear on the products but we often encounter problems with the labels. In an ideal world a client would supply us with perfect labels but very often they aren’t completely straight as the tolerances of the machines used to print them and attach them to the bottles aren’t that precise. They might look OK to the naked eye but once you try and photograph them any imperfections show up. We therefore had to straighten some of them in post production.
Finally, after all these stages you have some professional product photographs to use on your website, social media or for e-commerce!