Quick guides and tips for entrepreneurs
If you are selling or promoting anything that is a physical object (various products, food, drinks, cars, hotel rooms, jewelry, etc.) most likely, before starting to promote them in the online environment you had to take some photos. You had several options:
Take the photos yourself. After all, you paid good money for your phone or camera and the person who sold it to you advertised the incredible photo features included.
You decided to take the so-called professional approach and you hired a photographer.
You asked your media agency to take care of this part.
Unless you are an expert photographer, how can you tell if your photos are any good? Like any other field, photography requires years of learning and practice until you can develop a visual culture as well as technical and esthetical know-how that will allow you to say if a certain photo is good or bad and also to be able to say why is it good or bad.
Any honest photographer will tell you that he can give you pertinent feedback on the genre of photography he is specialized in. Of course, some general tips will be gladly offered as we, photographers, love to talk for hours about our craft but most of all we love to critique. A good wedding photographer does not necessarily have the know-how to properly critique commercial photography. At the same time, a commercial photographer does not have the proper know-how to make deep and pertinent comments about wedding photography.
To try and answer the title question, let's get back to the beginning. Why did you take the photos initially? If it was for at least one of the following reasons, you might be in luck as we will provide you with some valuable tips below:
You know that your online customers' decision to buy will be mostly an emotional one triggered by some visual stimuli;
You know that the first contact a potential customer has with your product in an online environment is through your product photos;
You love your products, you put a lot of effort, time, and money into creating them so you want them to look their best.
You want to sell your products as much as possible and every single shop, online marketplace, social media platform ask for photos. So they must be important.
Let us stretch our imagination a little. Be honest to yourself and choose which photo from the ones below is Apple using for their website:
Why do you think that is? At least because photos are important in order to be able to sell online and/or to market your products in the right way. Of course, photos are not the only element at work here, but they are a very important factor.
WHAT CAN YOU DO? In order to figure out if your photos are good enough.
Here are some tips on how to be able to identify at least that your photos have a problem:
Check out similar products from your competition.
Ask as many people as possible what do they think about your photos.
Find some product photography schools and kindly ask them for an opinion.
Download the guides offered by online marketplaces like Amazon, booking.com, etc.
Do some proofing with commercial photographers.
Check out our free consultancy service here: https://www.3435studio.com/consultancy
Check out similar products from your competition
It is the easiest thing you can do. So easy that we hope you have already done it. Go to google.com or Amazon.com or booking.com and search for similar products. Have a look at the images and compare them with your own. Better yet, if one of your competitors is a big brand, go check their website and compare their photos with yours. Say you are a jewelry maker, go and check Swarovski or Tiffany's websites and see how your photos compare.
Ask as many people as possible what do they think about your photos.
Family, friends, work colleagues, chances are that some of them came across similar products or have a better esthetic taste than you and they might point out some examples on why they think your photos are good or bad.
Find some product photography schools and ask for their opinion.
Do a google search, identify one or two that are famous, and ask a question: you are at the beginning with your product photography and you would like their opinion on your photos. Ask them to give you better examples of similarly photographed products or goods.
Download the guides offered by famous platforms and compare them to your photos
Here are some great examples:
Do some proofing with commercial photographers.
Any self-respecting photography studio or commercial photographer, when asked for a proofing session will be willing to do it for a product or two or will provide you with a link to their portfolio showing similar products to yours.
It is common for the photographer to do the proofing session for free but to ask to be paid if you decide to use the proofing photo set.
Check out our free consultancy service
Our studio is currently offering a free consultancy service for this purpose (and much more). You can find out more on this by following this link: https://www.3435studio.com/consultancy
We have helped many people have great photos of their products, maybe we can do the same for you. Below you can find a gallery showing some before and after photos from our projects - the image left is the before and the right column is the after:)
Let us know what you think in the comments as we would love to hear from you!
Stay safe and creative!