Easy and Creative Product Photography Ideas to Boost Your Sales
Online shoppers can be drawn to your store for a variety of reasons, but the importance of your store’s appearance can’t be overstated. It is product photography that catches the attention of your potential customers, keeps them browsing through more than just one product or product category in your store, convinces them to place an order, and even to become your loyal customer base.
This is why we suggest paying close attention to both the look and the visual feel of the products you’ve added to your store.
We’re here to share a few product photography tips and creative ideas, which you can put your own unique spin on. As you work on creating your online store, remember to keep your brand personality in mind and think of ways to show it.
Product Photography Ideas to Boost Your Sales
The main goal of product photography is to supply your customers with a realistic image of your product, helping them envision owning and interacting with this product. Your product photos, in turn, should provide your customers with not only the look, but also the feel of the product.
When thinking of the kind of product photography that would best fit your brand and attract your chosen customer base, you can start by looking at things from your customer’s point of view. This would help you get a better idea of what they are interested in and what they would be looking for.
Think creatively of who your customer is, what they like and what activities they engage in. This would help you come up with good product photography ideas that would catch your customer’s attention and help them visualize using your products.
For example, if your target audience is young musicians, you can go for product photography ideas that include people playing instruments.
If you’re selling products for dogs, your store would likely benefit from product photos that have real dogs, not humans, interacting with the products you’re selling.
Check out our blog How to Take Product Photos for Your Online Store for some additional tips.
Choose Your Background
Think of the setting you’d like to see your products in and the feelings you’d like your customers to get when they look at your products. A major part of this is choosing the perfect background for your product photoshoots, which enhances the qualities and features of the items you’re selling.
Essentially, there are two types of product photography – white background (placing a focus on the product itself) and lifestyle (placing a focus on the product’s use and role in your customer’s life).
Clean Cut, White Background, Product-Focused Images
This background type will put the focus purely on the product itself. This type of product photography is the most common one you’ll see while browsing through eCommerce marketplaces and is also one of the most affordable options to go for.
All you would need for this setup is a large, white piece of paper and some lighting.
Set a Scene for In-Context and Lifestyle Images
This background type will place the focus on the product’s use, often seeing the product in action (being used). This will help your customer imagine using it in the same, or a similar, fashion.
What you would need for this is an appropriate environment and even other living beings, so you could set up the scenery that you can imagine your products getting used in. For example, your photoshoot setting could be at your work desk, coffee table, a family dinner, or a camping adventure with friends.
From a photo of your product in front of a white background to one where it’s passed around in lifestyle shots, you can definitely find something that perfectly fits what you’re looking for.
There are a lot of mockup generators online (both free and paid), but you can start by looking at the product mockups we’ve already prepared for you – check out Printify images in our design generator.
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Use Macro Shots to Highlight Details
This type of product photography requires specific camera settings or the use of a macro lens.
You can think of macro shots as detailed closeups of your products. They can be a great addition to use in combination with other product photos if you’d like to highlight small features that a more traditional photo would not catch.
This type of photography works great for products with small, intricate designs, like jewelry.
Try Shooting From Unusual Angles
In eCommerce, we frequently see very similar types of product photography, because a lot of it is coming from the same sources and creators. This is why you should primarily consider product photography ideas that may be a bit more unusual, which would help you stand out from a growing crowd of online merchants.
A product photo is usually shot from eye level to give the most accurate representation of the product’s features. This means that giving your product a look from different angles can make your product photos truly unique and eye-catching.
An important thing to keep in mind, when taking photos of your product from unusual angles, is to make sure that your photos don’t distort the actual product in a way that would give your customer misleading expectations.
Show Variations of a Product in a Single Shot
As you try to come up with an innovative idea to showcase your products, you could consider showing all of your product variants in a single photo. This would help your customers avoid decision paralysis and choose the best product variant from the ones you offer more easily.
You can do this to showcase your products’ various designs, colors, sizes, shapes and materials.
To ensure that you catch your audience’s attention, you can also use creative product arrangements or any of the other ideas mentioned in this article.
Don’t Forget About People
People in lifestyle photography are usually placed in well-crafted scenes, where you can see them interacting with the product. Using people in your product photo can result in better engagement with your target audience, as it places a focus on the product’s use and future role in your customer’s life.
The people you choose for your product photos will represent your customers, which means that your primary goal is to ensure that your customers identify with the people in your product photos.
It is important to make sure that your product is the central element of your product photo instead of the activity or the people interacting with the product. This is an important adjustment to ensure that your customer’s mind does not stray away from the product you are trying to sell to them. This is especially important if you plan to use funny and engaging product photos.
Freeze Time for a Great Product Shot
Consider making action shots, which show your product in use right before something happens to it, for example, a shot of your mug before coffee is about to get spilled from it, or the shoes you designed about to hit the floor. These kinds of product photos that are centered on use and motion can attract attention and even showcase the durability of your products.
A freeze-frame shot is a great way to create an engaging photo, since it allows you to capture images that can’t be caught by the human eye.
Don’t Set Creative Boundaries
When it comes to creative thinking, no ideas are bad ideas, so try not to set too many boundaries on your experiments with product photography. You can try using unusual backgrounds, secondary objects, or photo manipulation, which can enhance the whole shopping experience for your customers.
Unusual backgrounds and visual manipulations, which you can create with photo editing software, will intrigue customers and have them spend a while looking at your product just for the visual experience. Using a few secondary objects, which don’t relate to the product itself, can help your customers understand the size and scale of the product you are selling.
Your product descriptions will likely mention the exact size of the product, but nothing beats the convenience of just seeing the size represented in the product photo. You can ensure this by having another everyday object set next to the item you are selling.
Add Some Smoke
Consider adding some additional magic to your product photos by using smoke during your photoshoots.
You can use image-editing software to add these intrinsic visual effects, but there are also a bunch of everyday items that you can use as props to aid you during your photo shoot.
For example, you can use incense sticks to ensure a steady flow of smoke, a dark background, paper silhouettes to cast shadows, as well as glass funnels and jars to add that mysterious element to a lab-like setting.
This idea is great, if you are going for a mysterious, or even eerie, setting in your product photography, but smoke can also be used in other settings. For example, it can provide you with coziness and warmth, if you change up your photoshoot’s location accordingly.
Reflect Your Products
When it comes to creative product photography ideas, another easy way to create stunning photos is by adding reflections to your product photos.
A reflection adds dimension and depth to your product. It can also make your product come across as shiny and sleek.
To achieve this, you can use reflective glass surfaces or mirrors – it is just that easy.
As an alternative, reflections can also be made with the help of Adobe Photoshop. But if you are looking for a free alternative that would help you create an eye-catching product photo with reflections, you can also check out photopea.com.
Why Not Levitate?
Making a product or a person float mid-air is sure to get your potential customer’s attention and yet another way to showcase the durability and distinct features of your products.
You can give your products a three-dimensional look that also displays motion or even an otherworldly feel, and you can do this with the help of a tripod or by just hanging your products. And an image editing software, of course.
One way to levitate your subjects (or objects) is by setting up your tripod to capture photos of a scene, where the subject steps (or an object is placed) on a stool.
The next thing you do is remove both the subject and the stool and then take some additional photos of the same location. The final thing is to overlay one image on top of the other and erase the stool and any associated shadows that should not be there.
Another way to levitate your products is by hanging them on a clear fishing line and then later editing the photo to hide the fishing line. This is a faster and easier way to achieve the levitation effect, making the use of a tripod less necessary.
You can also consider taking a product picture and removing the background with this free tool, which might be the easiest way to create the levitating effect in such photos.
Add a Flair of Your Personality
As you create and curate your own selection of product photos, remember that this won’t only serve as a great collection of product images, but also a way to display your brand’s identity and personality.
This is why you should ask yourself a few questions on what makes your product different from your competitors and why customers should choose you over anyone else.
Is your target audience picking up the ideas you are putting forth? Can it read your personality off of your products?
When your target audience appreciates your message and identifies with your personality, they will be more likely to stick around and become your loyal customers – this is your way of creating a devoted base of followers.
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What Is Product Photography?
Product photography is photography meant for commercial use – it is an image/photo, or “mockup”, of the product you are selling. It is used to showcase your product and its purpose is to convince other people to buy it.
You can see examples of product photography all over the web. They are present in most places where goods are sold and are there to help customers visualize the properties and features of the product, along with the actual experience of using the product. This is important in an online setting since your customers can’t touch and evaluate your products in person.
In order to create great product photos, you should keep your mind open to unique ideas and never miss a chance to experiment. Product photography is much like fine art photography, especially if you are the one in charge of creating the artistic vision of your brand. But that should not scare you, since you don’t need to get a relevant degree to do this – all of the necessary guides and tutorials are available online.
You can take the shared product photography ideas as a starting point in your journey to find the most suitable options for you, which would directly speak to the customers you’re aiming to reach.
Conclusion
From engaging lifestyle shots to detailed macro photos, there are many creative ways you can approach product photography to spice up your store’s appearance and to create engaging content for your existing and target customers.
You can use props, photo manipulation, interesting locations, and themes to sell your product, an idea, and even your personality.
There are many benefits that come with becoming a product photographer and carrying out your own photoshoots in addition to it being a lot of fun.
Taking your own product photos will ensure that you stand out from your competition and your photos are different from those that are already circling on ads, even if you are using the same product providers as your competitors.
Taking your own product photos is also a safeguard against reverse image search, which can be practiced by your competitors to determine who’s selling the same products and who you source your products from.
At the end of the day, this is a creative process, so remember to never delete product photos during your photoshoots, because you might accidentally trash some unique pictures that might work perfectly for your brand and your potential customers.
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Written by
Vita Stevens
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