Ask a business why the online shop has not launched and the honest answer is usually photography. The build is finished. What is missing is pictures of the products, and it stalls more shops than any technical problem we come across.
We hit exactly this when we built the store for Beth Bakes Cakes. The cakes were the easy part. Beth had been selling through Instagram with photographs taken at home on a phone, and they were perfectly decent photographs. They were just not doing the job a shop needs them to do.
What we started with
A white cake, on a white stand, on a white worktop, against a white wall. The edges of the cake dissolve into the background, the pink drip that took the longest to get right barely registers, and the stand and the skirting board are both in the frame. Nothing here is careless. It is simply a photograph taken to remember a cake rather than to sell one.
What changed
Same cake. A blush backdrop instead of a white wall, so the cake has an edge again and the drip reads as pink. Even light rather than whatever the kitchen was doing that afternoon. The cake centred with room around it, so it can be cropped square for a product tile or wide for a banner without losing anything.
None of that required a different cake, and it did not require an expensive camera either.
It is rarely the camera
A phone from the last few years is enough. What changes the result is light and consistency:
- Shoot near a big window on an overcast day, with the light coming from the side rather than behind you.
- Turn the room lights off, because mixing daylight and bulbs makes colours go strange.
- Put something plain behind the product. A roll of coloured paper costs very little and does most of the work.
- Use a tripod, or anything that stops the camera moving between shots.
- Leave space around the product so it can be cropped to different shapes later.
Do the whole range in one sitting
Consistency is the thing that makes a shop look like a shop. Twelve products photographed on twelve surfaces in twelve different lights look improvised however good the design around them is. One backdrop, one session, one set of settings, and suddenly a small range looks deliberate.
It also lets a photograph do more than show the product. The cookie leaning against the stack is there so you can see the chocolate, which is the entire reason somebody buys that cookie.
The three shots that do the work
- The plain one: the product filling the frame on a clean background, evenly lit, showing the true colour.
- The context one: the product in use, held or on a table, so the size is obvious.
- The detail one: the texture, the finish, whatever justifies the price.
Get those three right for every product before shooting anything clever for one of them.
A wedding cake, same treatment
The before is a good record of a beautiful cake. The after is something you can put on a wedding page, in an email, and on a product tile, and it will still look like it belongs to the same shop as everything else.
Start it before you think you need to
Photography has the longest lead time of anything in a build and it is the part nobody can do for you. A finished shop waiting on pictures is the most expensive kind of waiting there is, so start the shooting while the site is still being designed.
The short version. Three shots per product, one session, one background, natural light from the side, and space around the subject. That gets a shop live faster than any decision about the design.
You can see the finished store in our Beth Bakes Cakes work, and how we build shops under ecommerce. If you would rather not do the shooting yourself, it is something we do: product photography.