Fashion photography is one thing every eCommerce store cannot do without. Even if your product is the best anyone can currently find in the market unless you can transfer that quality to a picture, chances are you won’t be making many sales. With high-quality product photography, you streamline your customer’s decision-making process by providing them with a digital view of the quality they can get from you.
If you look around, the best eCommerce stores always provide the best everything, including their product photographs. At first, it might look daunting but taking product photos that sell isn’t hard at all. This article will share 10 essential product photography tips you must follow to produce fantastic product images.
Set Up Your Studio before Hand
Before taking any photo of your eCommerce products, you should set up the studio or the scene where you plan on taking those pictures before time. This is will help you in terms of the overall organization and creating the right atmosphere and energy for the people on set.
You should also work with a stylist to create a comprehensive style guide that can serve as a visual reference manual for how your shoot is meant to go. This style guide should contain a comprehensive compilation of what product should be worn by what model in what setting.
Planning all of this ahead of time will make your entire fashion photography shoot less stressful and it will also quicken your workflow.
Get creative with your props and staging
In the fashion eCommerce industry, creativity goes an extremely long way. Your creative mindset will give you that edge over your competitor, which should show in your fashion photography.
Using a white table or the same props is not always necessary when taking product images. Sometimes it’s good to switch everything up, add a bit of color, add extra props, and change the setting or environment. You should do all these to prevent your images from looking plain and boring.
Edit/Retouch your photos
When you retouch your product images, you can adjust certain things about the picture that you naturally wouldn’t have been able to notice. Things like positioning, fading lights, color blotches, etc. All this will add up and enhance the attractiveness of your pictures.
Editing the product photos for your eCommerce store will help you display your best image to your customers. In this case, images of high quality will always outperform those of lower quality. This in turn will help cement your brand integrity, build trust with your customers, and increase your conversation rates.
Use lifestyle photography
A human mind is a fantastic place capable of a billion beautiful things, and one of those things is our power of imagination. As the owner of an eCommerce store, lifestyle photography is one type of photography that you just can’t do without.
Taking product images in a life-like setting makes it easier for customers to imagine or visualize themselves in that item in a realistic setting. This will help them to build a more personal connection to your business.
Choose your background wisely
The background you select in fashion photography is a huge part of your storytelling and photography process. Honestly, you’d be surprised with the effect a simple background will have on people.
This is why it’s always nice to opt for an organized and simple background instead of a cluttered background that will drag attention away from your product.
Use models
Using models to model your products, also play a huge part in helping customers imagine themselves with your product. This is simply because they get to see it on a human like themselves and not just a table.
With a model, people will have the liberty of seeing just how well your product suits a person and how flattering it looks. Not to mention that model photography also helps with the representation of your brand.
Select the right photo angles
No one size or angle fits all, most especially when it comes to fashion photography. Some angles are better than others, and the only way you can find out those angles is by taking product photographs using different angles.
For example, in some angles, the lighting is good, while in others, the lighting is great. You have to find out which angle will give you a good product image, and which angle will give you a great product image.
Furthermore, you can test the waters by taking multiple photos with different angles, distances, and positions to see which works best. It is worth adding that multiple product images will also aid your customers in making their purchasing decision by clearly showcasing your product’s sides and angles. This will leave nothing to their imagination.
Take creative inspiration from well-known brands
The only way to be the best is to learn from the best. For instance, you can take inspiration from a brand like Amazon, by integrating some of their fashion photography techniques into something similar for your eCommerce store.
Perhaps, the simplicity of their setting might have stood out to you, or maybe they used a complementary background that perfectly highlighted the features of a particular product. In this case, the next thing you can do is recreate it for your store.
Optimize your photos’Size
At first, it might not seem like such a huge deal big the size of your product photo plays an equally important part as its quality. Larger images will make your website lag or load much slower than smaller images with the same quality.
Then there’s also the fact that you run an eCommerce store with millions of other people in the world, and you’re all competing for the same group of customers. If your website loads slowly and turns the shopping process into a task, no one will sit around and be patient with it.
One way you can achieve this is by using progressive JPEGs rather than baseline JPEGs as baseline JPEGs display your image’s full quality but reduce its loading speed. You can read more about web image optimization here.
Don’t forget the big picture
With all this learning and constantly striving to produce the best product images that you can with fashion photography, it gets very easy to get carried away, especially when you try to implement everything all at once, or if you’re doing it all by yourself. And honestly, this doesn’t do any good for you.
This is why you should always try to remember the big picture: you want to take amazing product photos that will sell. Once you remember the big picture, you can start from there, and remember always to start small. There’s no point in overwhelming yourself because chances are you’d just end up doing a terrible job and making no sales which is the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve.
Conclusion
Taking product photos that will bring in sales isn’t difficult if you know what you’re doing. But no one started as a professional, and everyone has to learn at one point or the other. By implementing the 10 tips in this article, you’ll be well on making your next major sale.
