The photographs you use for your brand can have a huge impact on the success of your product. If you are going to invest in professional product photography, it's important that you understand how the right product photos will help grow your business. This blog post is going to explore the benefits of using professional product photography for your brand!

Pay Attention to Detail

Product photography should show the product in detail. Professional product photos will have the ability to highlight the product's features and details. This helps customers get a better understanding of what they are buying while also creating trust for your brand. The phrase goes “the devil is in the details”... But in product photography the details of good photos come from photo backgrounds, lighting, shadows, high quality cameras, editing software and photography experience.  What I have learned over the past several years, is that all of these tools are necessary to get quality product photographs that can be used on websites, social media and print campaigns. So my advice would be to do one of  the following:

• Learn how to shoot product photography with all the quality equipment needed.
• Hire a professional photographer that specializes in product photography to do it for you.

Hi-Resolution Images Come from High Quality Equipment

In order to have good pictures for your product, you need very high resolution. And to achieve that, you need to use a DSLR camera with a good lens. As a web designer, I can’t tell you how many times client’s have tried to use their smartphone social media images on their website and don’t understand why the images are pixelated, blurry and unrecognizable when zoomed out. 

The short and simple answer is DSLR cameras are more powerful than smartphones when it comes to taking high quality images that can be used on websites, social media and print.

Smartphones take images meant for mobile consumption, the image file is smaller, the lens picks up less data. This means when you try to use an image taken on a smartphone and stretch the image, expand it to fit  a website’s desktop view, it will fail almost every single time.

Stay Consistent with Where You Place Your Product

Professional product photographers will take pictures of your product in the same position every single time. Being consistent with positioning and lighting makes it easier for people to understand what they are looking at, which is beneficial when there may be several other products on the market that look similar to yours. This kind of consistency matters because it helps the visitor visualize the dimensions/size of the product. Good focal points make it easy for viewers to find information quickly which increases the likelihood of a visitor clicking the buy button.

Landscape or Portrait Product Photographs

There is a time and place to use landscape and portrait photographs online. What I mean by that is different parts of a website use landscape images better than others. The same can be said about portrait images. Let me explain further, typically I prefer product photograph images in portrait view for the e-commerce sections. Because if all the product images are in that view style, it’s easier to focus on the product itself. But when I want to show lifestyle images to convey tone, branding and style, throughout other parts of the website, I look for editorial imagery in landscape view. Landscape images are easier to stretch from the left to the right sides of the screen. Portrait style images tend to stop short when trying to expand from left to right because they stretch more vertically.

I’ve shared some of my best practices about how to use product photography and I leave you with the following recommendation:

Professional product photography is important when selling your products and services. Poor images can make people not want to buy your things. So take good, clear photos. If people can't understand how the product works in the photo, they might not buy it.