A single product photo can look great on its own and terrible next to its neighbours. You only find this out when you put twenty of them in a grid on your website or in a catalogue, and suddenly one bottle looks warm and yellow, the next looks blue, one is tiny in the frame and another is cropped right at the cap.
That’s what we mean by surviving the grid. Each photo has to work as part of a set.
Same light, every time
The biggest single factor is lighting. If every product is lit from the same angle, with the same softness, at the same brightness, the range will look consistent even if the products themselves are very different.
In practice that means setting the lights once at the start of the day and not touching them. If a product is too dark or too reflective, we adjust with small reflectors or flags around the product, not by moving the main lights. It’s slower than just tweaking things as you go, but it’s the only way to get a whole range to match.
Window light looks lovely, but it changes every few minutes. Fine for a lifestyle shot, a real headache for forty pack shots.
Same camera position and scale
We lock the camera on a tripod at a fixed height and distance and use the same lens for the whole set. Then we decide how much of the frame the product should fill, say about 80 percent of the height, and keep to that.
This gets tricky when you’ve got a tiny jar and a big tub in the same range. You have two choices: show them all the same size, which looks tidy but hides the real difference, or show them at true scale, which is more honest but leaves small items floating in empty space. There’s no right answer, but you need to pick one and stick to it.
A plain background that's actually plain
White or light grey is the usual choice for e-commerce and catalogues. The trick is getting it to look the same in every shot. We light the background separately from the product so it stays consistent, and then clean up any small variation in editing.
If you need the products cut out completely, for example to place them on coloured backgrounds in a brochure, tell us before the shoot. Lighting for clean cut outs is slightly different and it saves a lot of editing time later.
Prep the products
This sounds silly, but it matters more than anything technical. Dust, fingerprints, scuffed labels and dented boxes all show up clearly at high resolution. We ask clients to send their best looking stock, not whatever was at the front of the warehouse, and we keep gloves, a soft brush and a cloth on set.
Name the files properly
Finally, every image gets named with the product code before it leaves the studio. If you’ve ever tried to match 200 photos called IMG_4471 to a product list, you know why.
If you’re planning a catalogue or a new online shop, have a look at our product photography, or send us your product list and we’ll suggest how to group the shoot.
Header photo on Unsplash.
