Product Photography Set Up

Your product photography set up can be daunting when you are first setting out on your journey. For small photography business on a budget, investing in expensive photography equipment can be a risk, and to perfectly honest is not needed to produce great images.

Taking quality product photos is far easier now than it was a few years ago. You can even get great results from your mobile phone. In addition editing software is readily available, and inexpensive. Producing e-commerce photography is probably a lot simpler than you think.

Product Photography Set Up – Home Studio Tips

Here are some tips and practical steps for creating your own DIY photography studio.

1. Create an Appropriate background

What do I mean by ‘an appropriate background?’ Making sure you have a background that compliments and highlights the product you are photographing is one of the most important parts of product photography. In my opinion the image below does not highlight the products enough.

The right background highlights and isolates the product you’re photographing. It also helps the post editing process. Try using a white or light backdrop, as this will make it easier to remove unwanted objects and retouch photos.

This gorgeous bag from Charika Creations was shot on a white background so that the focus is entirely on the product.

You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg on backgrounds to get great product shots. Here are some affordable options that will do the job perfectly well:

A Small Table

One of the simplest product shoot set ups is using a table with your chosen background laid or built on top. You can get a variety of cloth, in various colours, which can be used to isolate the product. Obviously you don’t want to be using a white cloth with a predominantly white product. It would end up looking like a white cat in a snow storm. Here is a perfect example. As you can see there is very little contrast and as a result the product does not stand out.

A Chair

Push the back of the chair against a wall and tape the background cloth on the wall above the chair, and let it fall down the wall and over the chair. This will create a lovely clean transition between the vertical and horizontal planes whenever you position your product on the chair.

However, for larger products you will need to invest in a stand-mounted background. Or, you can use the same method as the chair-mounted sweep by affixing the background to a wall.

Light tent

Another affordable option is a light tent or light box. You can get them off Amazon for as little as £100. Another option is to build your own lightbox. It will need translucent walls and a constant light source, which helps create an evenly distributed light around the object in focus.

DIY Product Photography Set Up

To make your own, you’ll need some kind of plastic storage container or a wooden frame. Cover the sides with translucent material to produce a more evenly distributed light.

Position artificial lights around the container, or near to a window for natural light from a nearby window if you’re working on a budget.

2. Product Photography Set Up

It may seem simple, but setting up your product always takes me a few tries to get the angle, lighting and position just right. Bear in mind if you working with a customer on a paid job, you will have to take and share sample images to make sure what you are producing fits with their creative vision. This isn’t as easy as it sounds!

Place your product in front of your preferred background. How you position the product will depend on what you are photographing and the look you are aiming for. The barbershop image below makes use of a simple piece of drilled wood and a few related props. The focus was achieved through a wide aperture, (f 1.4 in this case.)

For things like jewelry and other accessories, you may want to use something that creates a nice reflection and displays the product at its best. Time spent adjusting the product until it’s precisely positioned is time well spent.

For smaller, more intricate products, here are a few more tools that might be helpful:

• Glue dots and tape for keeping small products in place, such as earrings or necklaces
• Mannequins for clothing and accessories, (real models are better)
• Hangers or eye-catching backgrounds for displaying products at different angles
• A friend or team member for creating fun lifestyle shots, (indoors or out)

3. Lighting

Quite possible the most important part of capturing excellent product photographs is your lighting set up. It is time consuming, but taking the time creating good lighting makes all the difference.

The two types of light sources to choose from are, natural light and artificial light.

Shooting with Natural light

I love shooting with natural light, it isn’t just for those photographers who are on a budget, for me, using natural light is the best option. 

Just be careful when shooting outdoors because the sun can create some harsh shadows and your model might end up squinting.

If you are shooting indoors, place everything close to a window that gets a lot of natural light. If the light is too intense, try diffusing it with a sheet or other translucent material, hung over the window.

Artificial light

If you have the budget to splurge on studio lights or you want to shoot during different times of the day when the light isn’t at its peak, or you want to be able to control the light source, then artificial light might be the solution.

There are a plethora of lighting options, far too many to go into in this post, but once you have your studio lights, you can decide how you want to position them to achieve your desired look.

One light should serve as your key light, placed in front of your product, and the other should act as a fill light, positioned to make the most of your subject. This watch is a perfect example.

4. Stability is Key

True, you can shoot hand held, but there is always a risk of motion blur, so to make sure you take pin sharp images that captures every detail of your product, you’ll want to be shooting at f8 or even more closed. However, if the product has to be in focus from front to back then you may well have to resort to photo stacking.

Unfortunately, using a higher f number results in a lower shutter speed and this makes it all but impossible to hold the camera still enough to avoid ending up with a image blur. However, a tripod solves all of these problems.

6. Shoot lots of Images

Finally, it’s time to see if your product photography set up works and produces great images.

NOTE: If you are working with a client make sure to keep them in the loop as you go. It is vital to remember that it isn’t your creative vision you are trying to capture, it’s theirs!

Once you have shot a batch load them into your editing software, in my case Lightroom, where you can have a play and see what has worked and what needs tweaking. I always upload each batch  into an album on my site and send the link to my customer so they can feedback on what I have done up to that point. This saves a massive amount of time in the end.

7. Retouching

When I retouch it involves working with the light and maybe the crop, but on the whole I try to get it spot on in camera. If you are having to remove unwanted objects from your images you seriously need to improve your set up.

Post-production is a vital part of the product photography process and it shouldn’t be rushed. If you deliver quality images to your client which fulfill their creative dream and look fabulous, you will get recurring work and recommendations.

8. Optimising for the Web

There are a lot of software solutions which will compress your images for displaying them on your website in a way that does not reduce the way they look but improving load times. If you aren’t careful, your images can slow your web pages down so much that your visitors simply leave. Not a good result after all that hard work.