75% of online shoppers rely on product photos when deciding whether to purchase a product. By improving your product photos, you could generate more customers. Below are a few product photography tips to consider.
Keep your photos consistent
Your photos need to have a sense of consistency. If each product is photographed from a different angle or a different distance, it could make some products inadvertently look bigger than others. Photographing each product from the same position can help customers to get a more accurate idea of the scale. Using a tripod is the best way to achieve this. You should also try to use the same background in all your photos too. This could involve using a blank white/black background or you could try setting a scene (when photographing sofas, you could consider positioning them in a mock living room taken from the same angle).
Get the lighting right
Lighting can greatly affect the quality of your photos. Unwanted reflections and shadows will distort what your products look like and could give a poor impression of what to expect. Try to shoot indoors where possible to give you the best control of light. Using off camera lights to help get the brightness in the room right. A basic rule to follow: the backlight should be slightly brighter than the front. You can find more product photography lighting tricks here.
Avoid wide angle lenses
Wide angle lenses can give a distorted view of what your product looks like. Customers may be disappointed if they buy your product and it ends up being smaller than expected simply because you used a wide angle lens. Avoid any lenses that distort the size of your product.
Consider 3D photos
More online sites are now using 3D photos of products. These are photos that offer a 360 degree view of your product – customers can drag the cursor around to see the product from all angles. Such photos are actually made up of many photos taken from different angles. There are apps nowadays that can allow you to take 3D photos on your phone.
Hire professional help
Hiring a professional product photographer could be a good way to ensure that your photos are high quality (particularly if you don’t have much experience with photography). Such professionals may even have studios set up with access to various backgrounds. When it comes to clothing or equipment, you may also want to consider hiring professional models to showcase your products in the best way possible. You can search for models through agencies where you can find bio pages such as this one for Hope Beel. A variety of models could be worth hiring if you have lots of products to display.
Optimize your images
Did you know that your images can have an impact on your site’s SEO? Tricks such as using relevant file names and adding captions to images can help to improve your rankings. It’s worth also considering the resolution of your images. You don’t want too many high resolution images as this will make your site load slowly. If a web page loads slowly it can affect the rankings for that page. Less patient visitors to your website may also leave if an image isn’t loading quickly enough. Search Engine Journal has some great tips for optimising images.
