28th Sep 2009
Product Photography, Where to Begin
Product photography is a great skill that isn’t easy to master and so many people struggle with it. Therefore here at Excellent Product Photography we have the goal of giving you plenty of information and advice that will get you well on your way to creating a career out of product photography.
To start off, we must mention that this field takes a lot of practice and the gear required to produce the desired results can get expensive. If you do not have time to invest into practice, or money to invest in top quality professional gear, this may not be the field for you.
The basics of product photography are:
1) Good clean camera lenses
If you don’t have a clean and clear camera lens you won’t be able to get optimal results no matter how good you are on the rest of the basics. You can clean things up in Photoshop to a certain extent, but there is a time when things just don’t get any better. To avoid making the mistake of unusable images because of a bad lens, just make sure you have a clean lens! When purchasing lenses inspect them for fungus, dust, scratches and any other blemishes that they may have. Newer lenses will generally have less problems, but that isn’t always the case.
2) Good exposure
You need to make sure that you have the correct exposure when you take your photos. You can use the histogram in your camera to check this. If the lines in the histogram are very far to the left, that means your image is too dark. If they are very far to the right, your images are too bright. A dark image is usually referred to as being under-exposed and a bright image is over-exposed. Many cameras can shoot in Av mode which means you set the aperture and the camera automatically adjusts the shutter speed for you.
3) Good sturdy tripod
Without a tripod your images are prone to become blurry. This is something you don’t want. For the very best results you must have crisp and sharp images. This definitely requires a tripod.
4) Good lighting
For good lighting it’s never a good idea to use the on-camera flash. It is usually too harsh and gives the product a kind of yucky look. How’s” yucky” for technical terms? : ) It is a good idea to make sure you have a main light, a fill light and possibly a back light. This is a fairly deep subject and I will go into this in more detail later.
5) Good practice
As the saying goes, practice makes perfect. This couldn’t be more true than with product photography. You must be willing to put in the hours of practice that the other pros are putting in. If you don’t, your product photography just won’t measure up and you’ll find yourself without clients. Please do yourself a favor and practice, practice, practice.
I will go into each of these in more detail later, but this should give you a good start.
Product photography is a great skill that isn’t easy to master and so many people struggle with it. Therefore here at Excellent Product Photography we have the goal of giving you plenty of information and advice that will get you well on your way to creating a career out of product photography.
To start off, we must mention that this field takes a lot of practice and the gear required to produce the desired results can get expensive. If you do not have time to invest into practice, or money to invest in top quality professional gear, this may not be the field for you.
The basics of product photography are:
1) Good clean camera lenses
If you don’t have a clean and clear camera lens you won’t be able to get optimal results no matter how good you are on the rest of the basics. You can clean things up in Photoshop to a certain extent, but there is a time when things just don’t get any better. To avoid making the mistake of unusable images because of a bad lens, just make sure you have a clean lens! When purchasing lenses inspect them for fungus, dust, scratches and any other blemishes that they may have. Newer lenses will generally have less problems, but that isn’t always the case.
2) Good exposure
You need to make sure that you have the correct exposure when you take your photos. You can use the histogram in your camera to check this. If the lines in the histogram are very far to the left, that means your image is too dark. If they are very far to the right, your images are too bright. A dark image is usually referred to as being under-exposed and a bright image is over-exposed. Many cameras can shoot in Av mode which means you set the aperture and the camera automatically adjusts the shutter speed for you.
3) Good sturdy tripod
Without a tripod your images are prone to become blurry. This is something you don’t want. For the very best results you must have crisp and sharp images. This definitely requires a tripod.
4) Good lighting
For good lighting it’s never a good idea to use the on-camera flash. It is usually too harsh and gives the product a kind of yucky look. How’s” yucky” for technical terms? : ) It is a good idea to make sure you have a main light, a fill light and possibly a back light. This is a fairly deep subject and I will go into this in more detail later.
5) Good practice
As the saying goes, practice makes perfect. This couldn’t be more true than with product photography. You must be willing to put in the hours of practice that the other pros are putting in. If you don’t, your product photography just won’t measure up and you’ll find yourself without clients. Please do yourself a favor and practice, practice, practice.
I will go into each of these in more detail later, but this should give you a good start.
Posted by Bill Kimber under 
Photography Basics 
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