Great product photography is the key to increasing your eCommerce sales; the quality of your product images is crucial to both your product’s first impression on a potential customer and their final purchasing decision.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need the latest and greatest DSLR to take great product images. Smartphones these days are perfectly capable of taking amazing photos — the trick is to nail your set-up, and you don’t need professional studio equipment to do this either. Here are 7 product photography tips for shooting on your mobile.
1. Shoot near a window
If you’re shooting with a smartphone, chances are you don’t have access to professional lighting equipment. The good news is that you don’t need it — natural lighting will give you great results if you know what you’re doing.
You need to use the sun as an indirect light source, so the best place to shoot is near a window. Note that the intensity and color of sunlight changes, so spend a bit of time getting organised so that you can shoot everything efficiently and end up with consistent photos. Stay clear of shooting in the early morning or late afternoon to avoid harsh shadows and that golden hour flow.
If the lighting is too bright and your products are overexposed, diffuse it by covering the window with a white sheet or taping white paper over it.
2. Set up a white backdrop
The key to bright and accurate colors is shooting on a white backdrop, which will reflect white light onto your product to give you a well-lit, nicely-contrasted photo.
The best kind of white backdrop is a photography ‘sweep’, which is a white backdrop that transitions seamlessly from the vertical to the horizontal surface. You can buy a professional photography sweep, or create your own with a few simple everyday objects. The right size will depend on the size of your products, as the sweep needs to be larger than products and ideally, it should take up the entire camera screen.
The easiest way to do this is to make a DIY shooting table. This will give you a lot of control and flexibility with your light sources because you can move the table closer to or further away from the window.
Use a cardboard box or a small table for the horizontal surface. For the vertical surface, you’ll need two scrap pieces of wood around 2ft tall. Grab a hammer and nail these on either side of box/table’s back edge – these will hold up the sweep. Finally, you’ll need the sweep itself. I like to use plain white wrapping paper because of how smooth and reflective it is, but you can use any kind of paper or a white sheet. Attach the sweep to the two wooden planks (spring clamps work best but you can make do with tape or pegs).
3. Use a fill light
When you set up your shooting space, the window should be on the left or right of the product, with the sweep behind and camera in front. This means that your light source will be hitting the product from only one side, so you will need something to reflect the light onto the other side.
You can purchase a reflector online or from your local photography store, or you can make your own fill light. Use anything white and reflective — you can even fold a piece of card in half to that it stands up (the shinier the paper the better). You’ll need to play around with the angle to see what works for you. If you have room that’s very bright with windows on all sides, you may find that you don’t need one.
4. Use an smartphone mount
For track-sharp images, get yourself a smartphone mount to stabilise your camera. You should also enable a timer (there are iPhone and Android apps for this) so that the phone has time to restabilize after you press the capture button.
5. Avoid the flash and digital zoom functions
Avoid using the smartphone flash at all times to avoid overexposing your photos. Your shooting space needs to be sufficiently lit without the flash for a great photo.
Also, if you need to get closer to the product, move the mount closer to the product — do NOT use the digital zoom. This just crops the photo as you take it, and will lower the quality of your final image. As mentioned above, you want the white sweep to fill the entire frame and the product should take up a large portion of the shot.
6. Be careful of over-editing
Product images need to help the viewer clearly visualise the product in their mind, as nothing compares to being able to physically touch and see the product before buying it. You need to represent the product accurately and professionally, so you need to ensure that you don’t over-edit your photos.
If you’ve followed the tips above, your studio setup should take near-perfect photos. You should definitely crop your product images so that the product is in the centre and takes up 80-90% of the shot. You can also play around a bit with some minor brightness, contrast, exposure, and saturation adjustments, but only enough to make the product pop a little. You might also want to adjust the temperature of the photo if you feel that your original shot looks a bit too blue or yellow. My favorite app for these kind of edits is VSCO.
Stay clear of filters and never place text over your images — either of these will make your product images look a lot less professional.
If you want to take your product photography to the next level, edit your images in Adobe Photoshop on a computer. You’ll be able to remove the background and really make your products stand out, as well as add drop shadows and reflections to give your product a bit more depth.
7. Sync your photos to your computer
Avoid storing all your images on your smartphone. This might not apply to you if you transfer your images to your computer and upload them from there, but if you do everything off our phone you should always have a backup. If you’re using an iPhone, you can sync everything to iCloud automatically. If you’re using an Android phone, you can sync your images automatically to your Google Account.
My personal favorite for storing product images is Dropbox. Create an account, download the iPhone/Android app, and store all your product images in one place.
What are you waiting for?
When it comes down to it, product photography with a mobile is all about getting the set-up right and leveraging the benefits of using a multi-purpose device that connects to the Internet. Sure, you get what you pay for and using a DSLR does have many advantages, but you’ll need to perfect your studio either way. Learning to take product photos on your smartphone is definitely the place to start.
Author Bio:
Holly is the founder of Pixc, an on demand photo editing service and app on the Shopify store. She has experience in building and running online stores and growing a large social media following. She loves online shopping, beautiful images and unique typeface.