Product Imagery

Transcript

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about how to create great product imagery.
I’m here with rich and James today, and we’re chatting about product imagery, and especially for him social media and E commerce sites. So guys, why does good products imagery matter?
Because you know, your products best. A lot of people don’t have good product imagery, they have a great website, the great copy, but don’t really focus on the product imagery, they use low resolution images, for example, that’s not correctly call it, I have a lot of experience myself and Lucas here, we do quite a lot of product photography, and even product videos now, with websites moving on somewhat. And I think it’s always really important to take really high resolution crisp imagery, should you need it for print in the future. And then you can scale it down for the website and give the user a much better experience. All platforms now. Both websites and other ecommerce platforms like eBay and Amazon now request much larger images, it used to be 1000 by 1000 pixels, for example, is now several 1000 pixels, because they want to give that super sharp product image stroke, render quality imagery. And that’s what we’ve been doing a lot of lately, especially product renders, if they’re on a bottle or container, majority of the time, we’ll design the package in any way. So it makes perfect sense to do a product render. So it’s not always a photo that you need. We can do product renders as well. But yeah, they work really well. And obviously, you know, your, you know, your products and how it should be portrayed and how it should be photographed as well. So we’ve worked alongside a lot of clients to make it look good on a white background, for example, or on a coloured background. But also in a lifestyle environment being used, it’s important to show the product being used or even assembled, or how it’s even made, just give background information on how the product works. We find that quite useful. As part of the product description really, instead of going lengthy on the tech show more images, I think
the key as well with parameters to be consistent. So yeah, we’ve all seen websites where you’ve got a grid of photos, and three of them have got white backgrounds, and one of them hasn’t, and they were clearly done at different times. And then they start to bring an unprofessional feel to that website. I think it’s important to set a style for the imagery, and always trying to recreate that style, which is not always the easiest thing to do when you’ve got sort of lighting and shadows and things to consider when you’re producing images, especially when you’re photographing them. But it’s important to try and be as consistent as possible because it becomes part of the website’s brand. And yeah, from our experience, if it’s an individual product and done against a white background, obviously that can be cut out of that background and onto other things anyway. So it gives the client more options in terms of using the imagery outside of just its original purpose. It is also really important for clients to have a good library of all their product images, because you never know when they’re going to be needed. So if you start to move to sort of push your website into third party marketplaces, and they all require the same images anyway. So once you sort of invest the time into doing it right, once you’ve got them forever, then you can use them across every platform. And as Rich was say, really, they are important because images sell products. Yeah, that the text of the of the description doesn’t really sell it, unless you’ve got an image to contextualise that and look at it. So it’s really important to get those images, right getting great quality, and you have the most chance of selling from from what you’re advertising.
And I think it’s really important to get that nice, crisp, crisp bear photo of the products themselves. A typical example cottage delight, we do work for cottage delighted on the website. And they have absolutely beautiful product photography. It’s not just a jar of product, the packaging does look nice. And the jar itself looks really nice. Well, there’s really good lifestyle shots that they use across social media as well as their websites, showing it on the kitchen table, for example, or with condiments and with all the things that can go alongside that product to give the user a little bit more idea of how they can use it as well, especially in recipes and things. So it works really well there’s certain clients of ours that do a great job, it helps they’ve got a really good in House photographer. Some people haven’t got an in house photographer but with a little bit of research, there’s plenty of resources especially on YouTube that so so I started out many years ago really just watching YouTube videos on how to take photos. And now there’s so many that that focus on photography for iPhone, for example, or for some of the high end phones that give the same outcome really some really good crisp photos that you can do yourself and set up your own little studio at home or in the office.
So with that, then how much do you think it will be a cost for people to start taking their own photos have really high quality ones if they don’t have the kind of accessibility to have a in House photographer or a marketing person that can sort it out for And
from my point of view, being a photographer, it’s not just about grabbing the phone and taking a picture, I think lighting is the most important factor. But it’s relatively cheap, you can buy some good setups on Amazon. And there’s some specific setups for mobile phone photography as well it do help. It depends on product size as well, we’ve got some products with with huge, some customers with huge product products, and they’re really tricky to photograph. But if you’ve got a nice small product, you can get a photography tent and lighting set, felt relatively cheap. And then it’s just a matter of kind of self educating online on YouTube. And it’s pretty straightforward.
I’ve seen some of our customers sort of buy the setups themselves and come back to us. And they’re absolutely amazing the work they’ve done with them, they’ve really spent the time to learn how to use what they’ve bought, and done a lot of practice shots, and they’ve got some great images. And yeah, that’s perfect. And they’ve got the setup then for themselves going forward. Obviously, like Rich said, sometimes you need the space to do it. Like we’ve we’ve got a client who, who does kilns and occasionally we have to photograph the kilns and they are, you know, 200 kilogramme products that are five foot tall, and it’s not easy to photograph that kind of thing. Or, yeah, we’ve got another client where we do some work photographing stair parts for them. And they were long piece of wood. And again, it’s just you need space to be able to do that. So not everyone’s really in position where they’ve got the available room to set up to do it properly. But you know, for your standard ecommerce product, that’s probably you know, tabletop size, then it’s certainly something that with a small amount of investment and a bit of learning time it can be done. Or of course, you just need to get a photographer to do it for you as well. But I think either way, once the investments been made into the imagery, at least you’ve got it forever, then it’s never going to be something that that you regret doing. And I think sort of once you’ve got the images, the next really stages wants to run your website. Why? Why is it in there, apart from just a sort of help sell the products, it’s also there, because you can get them featured into searches. So people, maybe that have got any familiarity with this, the area of SEO will have heard of something called alt tags. And they are basically labels that images getting websites. And the label is there to describe the image. So if you’re selling a mug, then the alt tag could potentially be green mug. Now Google then picks up on that word, and then it will actually then bring that up in a Google image search results. So your images on your website are quite likely to be in those search results, which gives you another avenue to share those images with people that are potentially looking for what you sell.
Now, that’s a really good tip as well. And I think there’s a lot of things that you need to consider with good photography. And it’s not just how you take them, it’s how you kind of get them out there as well. And one thing that I find quite interesting is, obviously the different layouts of social media platforms kind of require you to showcase things in different ways. And I think going back to cottage delight, they do a really good job of making their photography look kind of native to whatever channel it is that they’re showing it on, it doesn’t look out of place. So I’d say having your own setup as well. And kind of having the ability to create those lifestyle photos, makes it so much easier for social media way where sometimes like Time is of the essence. So it’s something that we talk about with clients about how they can recreate things, maybe putting their maybe putting the photo style into the barn guidelines for them as well so that they understand how to create those for themselves going forward.
Yeah, some people do find it quite daunting. Taking the actual photograph, they find setting the scene and we’ve got another client, they’ll set up the scene, they’ll set up several shots, maybe even some short video clips, and then we’ll be called in to do the work. It’s a team effort really. And time comes into as well as a lot of people sitting out there running businesses, and they don’t want to be focused on how to take a photograph. And if I always say the best combination is if the client sets up the scene and the product because they know it best. It’s really easy for a photographer to then come in and take photos and get the results that they want. It’s when the photographer’s doing the guesswork or the learning side of things to to show how the the the actual product could be when the client knows best. So that’s what when I’m when I’m called for a shoot for example, some shoots the product under maybe 300 products to take photo and it’s all done quite quickly, very little editing afterwards. And everything looks the same and consistent, really easy photo shoot on a background for example. All the shoots they are lifestyle. So it does take time and but you spend a whole day with a team taking taking lifestyle shots. food photography is particularly difficult and tricky and a very specialist thing. But if the company producing the products, the food and they know how they want it portrayed, if they create the actual shot itself, and they see the shots been taken in real time then it’s a damn sight easier and quicker. And that’s what we tend to do we say up there. Together, they can see the photos in real time as they’re being taken, we can adjust the light in the colour. And the end product ends up being absolutely perfect pretty much when we leave site, there are elements of editing and preparing for galleries and, and putting them online for the client to store unused and access bought the price. The primary purpose of that whole day photography is to get the shot the client wants of their product. So the photographer, it’s easy for the photographer to go in and do it.
No, that makes sense. So if anyone’s got any questions on product imagery and how to make the most of them, just get in touch with us at Hello Sue marketing.com