How To Prepare For A Product Photography Session
Any photography session begins with the planning. Whether you’ve chosen to book with a professional photographer or capture the images yourself, there are a few things you’ll need to know to prepare for a product photography session.
Style guide
The first step is to create your style guide. Send it to your photographer, or remind yourself of the details.
If you don’t have a style guide, we talk you through how to create one here.
Shot list
Having a shot list for your products will help to keep the session running smoothly. Think about where you’d like the images to be used and what products would work best for each use case. Include specifics like angles, colours, and any blank space needed to drop in text.
Drawing out your ideas is a helpful way to communicate them to your photographer (even if you’re not the world’s best artist).
When you have a complete list you’ll be able to put each shot into a logical order, so you don’t need to waste time packing and unpacking products.
Prepare your products
Use your shot list to pack your products in the order they’ll be needed. Every product will need to be cleaned, straightened and checked for imperfections before it gets packed. You’ll also want to pack extra items, and anything you need to re-clean your products on the day of the session.
We recommend preparing your products one to two days before your session. That way you’ll have enough time to replace, re-do or re-think anything that hasn’t quite gone to plan.
Think backgrounds
Along with your products, you also need to think about your backgrounds, props and accessories.
Keep referring back to your shot list and pack any extra items in order. If you can pack them next to the product they’ll be photographed with, even better.
If there are any items that catch your eye, pack those too. It’s always better to have items and accessories that don’t get used on the day than to wish you’d picked something up.
To find out more about what we do here at Fat Cats Photography, take a look at our What We Do page. If you have any questions we’re always happy to hear from you, just get in touch.
