How to Make a Product Sing

February 10th, 2010 by Kris

So, last week we talked about the simple fact that solid product photography can make or break your e-commerce or print catalogue. I wanted to talk this week a little about what we do in order to make those products we shoot look like rock stars!

Let’s take a quick look at 2 product lines that I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Today, I’ll talk about Master Grinding and tomorrow I’ll talk about Twelve South.

Master Grinding, maybe I should change the title of this post to “How to not cut your finger off when working with incredibly sharp objects.” But, I don’t know how SEO friendly that is. Anyway, the product shots are all live at http://www.mastergrinding.com/ and let’s talk about the thought process for this gig. We’ll do this in a pros and cons list, because everyone like lists, right?

Pros of these products:

  • multiple colors of handles, including black and white
  • they shipped us samples of 90% of their inventory so we have options
  • they want everything shot on white or black (easy retouching if needed)
  • any “lifestyle” shots need to look and feel like the non-lifestyle shots

Cons of these products:

  • mirror finished blades
  • the company is rebranding so there’s a mix logos stamped on blades (falls under the necessary retouching)
  • handles are very simple and designed for use not looks
  • size difference, the pairing knife is 4 inches long, the double handled cheese knife is 3 feet long.

I’ll run though these pretty quick:

  1. Mirror finished blades, well we had to play the angle game a little and set up a white light tent. BUT because of the size difference, we ended up using a set of shoot thru scrims to do the same thing. The strait on shots on the respective home pages were shot with the assistance of an art director, an intern and a huge sheet of white paper that had a hole cut into it. It really was all about the angles.
  2. We ended up just retouching most of the mixed logos and there a few shots that we got away with not having to touch.
  3. The idea that the handles are very straight forward ended up being a huge advantage for us, for 2 reasons. First, we didn’t have to worry about showing a detail on the handle or anything in every shot, we could just focus on getting the cleanest image of the blades.

So, there’s the quick and dirty details.

Here are few of my favorite shots from that shoot:




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