product photography guide

product photography guide

How to shoot amazing product photography for your online store.

This guide will briefly talk about the equipment, settings and post editing for preparing running shoes photos for an online store.

You can use any camera to take great images for product photography (even smartphones) but you will have more flexibility in post and less errors if you take photos in raw and in manual mode.

Be sure to use a tripod to get consistent looking shots for all your images as well as reducing camera shakes and overall better quality images.

Tripods also serve the purpose of reducing the ISO settings to capture sharper images.

You can shoot jpegs or raw. Raw images will give you the advantage of advanced edits with the help of Lightroom.

Lighting is also very important. You don’t want harsh direct light. I used a soft box tent that helps diffuse light. Soft light will give your products a more stunning appearance.

Once you have a tripod and controlled lighting, shooting in manual will give you better results with consistency.

The reason to use an aperture of at least F8 is so that the entire product is in focus. If you use values like F3.5, some of the areas can get out of focus.

ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor. You can get brighter images with higher values but will be more grainy in low light conditions.

The shutter speed will need to be relatively slow to allow more light in. This is not a problem with a tripod. If you take handheld, you will introduce camera shakes.

Also check the White balance of your camera settings if your going to shoot in jpegs. Not all lights are the same and you may end up with slightly yellowish or blueish images.

Gears used for product photography:

Panasonic G7 camera (micro four thirds sensor)
http://amzn.to/2rkU32Z

A softbox tent
http://amzn.to/2swMtXu

Aputure Led light set
http://amzn.to/2swCl0V

A tripod lying around
http://amzn.to/2trh7Oi

a grey card (for white balance)
http://amzn.to/2rkDjJd

x-rite display pro color calibrator
http://amzn.to/2sEb3oP

Softwares used:
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Photoshop

Previous video on Color Calibration: