What Style of Product Photography Is Perfect?

Spark their interest by engaging with a visual language they’ll understand.

Before You Hire a Photographer

If you don’t own a fancy coffee table book on photography, you might enjoy leafing through a few of them at the bookstore, or check out an online photography exhibit.

Viewing the work of multiple photographers will expand your vocabulary and appreciation of what’s possible.

So much information is captured in an art photo. Of course, that also holds true for product photography, which broadcasts the essential features of your brand.

Before you hire a photographer, use this mini guide to help determine specifics about who your customer is.

What’s your customer’s unique offer, what is their selling point? Knowing that will make choosing the style of your product photography easier.

Picture the Following Scenes

There’s a group of modern-day 25-year-olds wearing vintage 1940s outfits going swing dancing and calling each other “Daddy-o.”

In a high-end corporate building, you’re in a sculptural, asymmetric conference room on the 63rd floor looking out at the skyline.

A joyful, laughing woman stands in front of a clean wall. It’s painted a saturated orange color.

At a nightclub in 1980s New York, dancers on stage wear fig leaves and gold sandals.

In Los Angeles, people drink herbal mocktails and sway to trance music at a drug-free event.

The exterior of a one-story office building is covered in industrial sheet metal held together with purple fasteners.

What To Do With Your First Impressions

As you pictured each of those scenes, you most likely “saw” a style of photography, didn’t you?

Could you also picture a very specific type of person in each scene, even if the environment had no people?

Now think about your product or service and who your customer is. Were they represented in any of these images?

If not, what environment could you picture them in?

Assign a Candy or Dessert to Your Client

Is your client a candy cigarette? Are they an architectural wedding cake that belongs in a museum?

Or a box of chocolate truffles?

Could you see them as a candied apple or a piece of old fashioned taffy? Look around a candy store that carries merchandise from multiple decades for some ideas.

What does your customer’s candy say about them? For example, if they’re a candy cigarette, are they playful with a great sense of humor?

What Building Do They Live In?

Are they in a brownstone walk up in Harlem next to a salsa club?

An ultra-clean high-rise?

A comfortable, tree-lined street in an Ohio suburb?

Or are they filling up compost bins in an intentional living community?

Do you see how you are again getting an image of a type of person for each one of those environments?

When you think about your ideal customer, where do you suppose they would live?

Putting It All Together

As you think about who your customer is and what their unique offering is, stack up these images of an environment, a candy, and a home that represents something essential about who they are.

Success! Now you should have a clearer visual direction for your product photography!