Your Photo Shoots: Part Two: Lifestyle Shots

Your Photo Shoots: Part Two: Lifestyle Shots

Today I wanted to follow-up with part two on Product Photography. Here are a few of my thoughts when you need to do a Lifestyle photo Shoot.

Lifestyle shots – I know you might be wondering what this is. Well, it primarily shows people feeling good using your product. It talks about the psychology of your market and who they are. You want to have your models and the people in the photo, the clothes in the photo to be relatable for those who are most likely to buy your product.

• You need to keep the focus on the product and have them appear natural.

It’s a tough thing to do, so this is something I recommend you get some support around, if you’re going to take on doing lifestyle shots.

A case study

We had a product that was a car wash product, so for the lifestyle shots we showed an attractive woman wearing jeans and a white t-shirt to wash a red car. We were just showing the fender of the car, the wheel and the product next to the water bucket with her hands and leg in the shot. So you can do them so they aren’t just a white background and the person, you can put it in situations, but you need to consider it when doing these.

• When you’re hiring models you should have model releases in place so that you have all the free use of their likeness.

• Again, you need to make sure that lighting is important.

• You’ll need high-definition as well.

There are a lot of different pieces about this and when we post the recording, like I mentioned I’m going to include a couple of images of what a typical photo studio setup looks like.

• Take a lot of photos, not just the one to three that you think you’ll need.

Our shoot list for these products was about 35-36 different types of photos, different features, different benefits, different situations and then we took multiple even within that 36. From this two-day shoot we’ll be looking at 2000 images, some of which will be complete crap and won’t work, some of which will be okay and some will be used as thumbnails on the package to enhance a particular feature.

Others will actually go on a billboard that we’ll be doing, so this is a large-scale project but from two days you could see as many as 2000 photographs to pick from. So it’s important that you plan the use of the studio and the time. So that’s an example of a comprehensive photo shoot.

One of the most important things you can do as a starting business is the lighting and like I said before it’s super critical, in fact, the single biggest mistake that I see is under lit photos or those where the lighting is too ‘hot’ on the product. That means it has too many reflections, which haven’t been managed properly or if it’s shiny.

There’s some diffusion or photography tents that you can get if you’re going to do your own. These are basically fabric boxes that you put your product in where your camera lens can be right in this little opening so there are no distracting reflections on your product.

Now go, take some action!

Missed part one of this article? CLICK HERE to read it now!

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