Product Brand Photography Ideas
Brand photography for products is a marketing tool that allows you to advertise your product across digital platforms and for print marketing. For ecommerce brands that sell and market their products online, it’s important to work with a professional photographer who can offer a diverse digital catalog of images that can be featured in online ads, the business’ website, social media pages, and more.
In this post, I’ll be talking about brand photography ideas that you can apply to your product business. While I will be offering some specific product examples to explain each point, feel free to experiment and tailor these ideas to fit the product you’re selling.
The topics covered in this blog post will include:
Studio Ecommerce Photos
Brand Packaging Photos
Lifestyle Product Photos
Lifestyle Product Photos with Models
Bonus: Owner and Team Photos
Brand Style and Alignment
Where to Post Product Photos
Studio Ecommerce Photos
With studio ecommerce photos, I’m referring to your product shot against a white or neutral background. This is usually done in a studio with controlled lighting. The purpose of these images is to simply show what the product looks like and should be taken with different angles (a front-view of the product, side-angle, close-up details, etc.)
For reflective products like watches and jewelry, you’ll want to work with someone who has a specific knowledge of lighting in order to avoid any distracting reflections.
Brand Packaging Photos
Brand packaging photos are images captured of the packaging that the product comes in. When a customer receives the product, they’re also receiving the packaging that goes along with it, all of which ties into your brand identity.
For certain products like backpacks, packaging photos might not be needed. However, for other products (especially high-end fashion and beauty products like watches and fragrances), adding brand packaging photos into your online image database can be a good idea.
This style of photo can also be essential if your brand proudly employs eco-friendly initiatives and practices like recyclable and sustainable packaging.
Lifestyle Product Photos
In contrast to the typical ecommerce photos, you can get creative with locations and props for your lifestyle product photos. With lifestyle product photos, you can specify your brand identity. These photos are less about featuring the details of the physical product, but involve a bit more storytelling.
A tip I would provide is consider where your product is commonly used and incorporate that into your location and props. For example, a beach fragrance would make sense to photograph the product at the beach, or in a studio with sand seashells if you want the product photographed in a studio.
Lifestyle Product Photos with Models
Taking it a step further, lifestyle product photos with models is an opportunity to bring your product to life and show how the product is used with the help of a model. These photos can make for amazing advertising campaigns.
Lifestyle product photos with models might take a lot more time to plan because the photographer is not only finding the best ways to feature the product, but also working as a creative director with the model.
However, featuring models in your marketing photos allows customers to see what the product looks like on a person before buying it, and can influence whether or not they make the actual purchase.
As an extra note, you don’t have to necessarily feature the product in some advertising campaigns. You might see perfume ads feature a model posing in a location (sometimes with a photo of the product shot in a studio photoshopped into the final image.)
Bonus: Owner and Team Photos
Although this isn’t technically considered a product photo, I wanted to add this in because photos featuring the brand owner (or team) can be a great way for customers to get to know your company better.
Brand Style and Alignment
Knowing your brand’s style is important before deciding what kind of photoshoot you should do. A shot list can be a useful tool for product brand photography ideas.
Thinking about your product’s usage, target demographic, and location ideas, you can work with a photographer to create a photoshoot that aligns with your brand’s style.
A backpack brand catered towards nature lovers adventurers
A fun sunglasses brand geared towards young adults in their 20s
A high-end fragrance brand geared toward business professionals
All three of these examples feature different products, but also different styles that will result in completely different photoshoots.
Where to Post Product Photos
It’s imperative that you have communicated with the photographer what kind of license you receive from the session before starting the shoot. But here are some ideas of where you can post the images:
Website Product Pages
Blog Posts
Social Media Pages
Online advertisements/Google Ads
Ecommerce websites like Amazon
About and Team Mission page for brand owner & team photos