Product Photography, How to with Ex-Pro Lighting Kits
Good product
photography is essential for anyone selling any product, as
people often say a picture speaks a thousand words.
One of the most common mistakes in catalogues and on websites is
to use a poor quality Jpeg image with a grey background to
promote or sell a product, this will result in poor sales in
some sectors terrible sales.
Ex-Pro have been producing lighting kits as a direct result of a
need for lighting ourselves. As an electrical manufacture of
photographic products we had a need for product photo's and
contracting this out was in reality not cost effective and
certainly had time constraints.
We found that the equipment that was available from some of the
leading manufactures was in reality basic lighting and often
overkill for the average website or small business, our first
setup cost in excess of £1000 and today we sell a similar kit
which gives the same results for under £100 !
Lighting is essential and the right lighting, if you use regular
lights from the home or office you will often find a grey
background or yellow tinge to the shot, resulting in hours of
cleaning images (if you have a lot in photoshop) if you use the
right kit, right lights the shot should be all but ready for use
online. It might need size adjustment or cropping depending on
your shot but just about ready in a fraction of the time.
Photo Lighting Tents
Ex-Pro tents are designed to white out the background, they also
come with 3 other colours, Red, Black and Blue if your object is
white or they are often used with shiny metallic objects.
The backdrops which insert to the Ex-Pro tents are manufactured
from a specific type of photographic material which does not
reflect back the shot from your camera, giving and infinite
look. Sure you could try doing this with a sheet of card gently
curved but the right light would need to be applied and by the
time you messed around it's more cost effective to buy a tent -
we tried !
Products are positioned in the middle of the tent, therefore to
work out the size of the tent you need, we always suggest taking
into account the largest of your products and adding a 30cm
square around it, otherwise you will be taking a photo of the
side of the tent and editing this out of the picture (defeating
the objective !).
Products are often supported through the use of plexi glass
supports available from a number of sources online these are
useful for positioning items, but providing you can not see the
support you can use anything with plexi glass ensure the angle
does not create a reflection, we have even used white-tak (Blue-tak
but white).
Our tents ship in 30cm, 40cm, 60cm, 75cm, 120cm, 150cm squares,
the are rounded at the corners, so we try to avoid the use of
the word cube, but they are almost a cube.
Photographic Product Lighting
One of the most important steps missed by many people using a
slice of card and popping a product on it, the most common eBay
shot you will see. Sure great for that table lamp you want rid
of but really can you use a table lamp to light an investment in
a product line you are selling in bulk or online ? The answer is
yes you can but you will not sell any where near as many.
Product lighting lights and diffuses the light to spread it
evenly over the product position the lights to the side of the
tent around 15-20cm away. If you have GU10 set for our box cube
kit's these lights are not constant running and should be used
for the shot then turned off, higher spec kit's have constant
lighting and use cool running daylight bulbs which can be left
on throughout the shoot. The tent effectively takes the light
from the sides and spreads it without spotting. If you have a
shiny product it will not appear with a white centre reflective
blob in the middle, other products will appear with an even
spread of light across the product lighting the white background
bright white and shadowing the product giving the effect of an
infinite background. Be inventive– for example, a piece of paper
rolled into a cone makes an excellent stand for rings.
It's important here to mention that any shot is only as good as
the camera you are using. Camera's should be on a tripod for
stability angled at about 45 degree's consider placing your
product as if you were looking in a shop window. The white light
balance settings differ on camera's it's important to experiment
with your camera's settings to get the best shot, make notes,
take test shots get the best settings and keep these handy.
You may want to consult your camera's manual on how to disable
any digital zoom features that your camera may have. Digital
zoom allows you to zoom in closer in on an object, but at the
expense of image quality, consider macro zoom on some shots and
experiment making notes.
Photographic Quality
Photos should be no smaller than 800 x 600 pixels at 72 dpi
(dots per inch), however may need adjusting for thumbnail shots
on your site (referring to a product listing) but certainly the
main shot which customer would zoom to on interest should be no
smaller than 800 x 600 pixels
Maximum file size should not exceed two (2) megabytes. Files
over this size become difficult to email and upload to the
website. They also take up an excessive amount of storage space.
Please note: if you also require the images for print, you will
need to save an original high-quality copy. Print requires an
image resolution of 200 – 300 dpi.
Editing
Before the photo is transferred to the website it needs to be
‘adjusted’ (cropped, colour or contrast-enhanced, etc) re-sized.
It is very unlikely the photos direct from the camera will be a
suitable size for display on your website but they will
certainly be edit ready and should need simply cropping ready to
go.
More tips
Some items, especially small things, may need something in the
shot to provide a sense of scale. Things like a ruler, or common
coins, are good for this.
Ex-Pro
Lighting kits can be purchased online through the following
sites :-
Exprodirect.com
|
