When an Edinburgh company were looking for product photographers to photograph their range of business stationery products, they asked us if we could capture the unique range of printing processes they offer.
Although, stationery products such as business cards might appear fairly simple to photograph, the days of simple cards printed on matt card are long gone. In the digital age, if someone still wants a physical business card, they want something more tangible, in the same way that vinyl records have made a comeback. Modern business cards therefore use a variety of sophisticated finishes such as 3D printing, gold and silver foil and UV to make them stand out.
3D Gold Foil. It was important to show the 3D nature of the printing as well as the gold foil.
As Edinburgh product photographers, the challenge was making sure these specialist finishes showed up clearly in the photographs, as this was key to selling them online. If a potential customer couldn’t see the difference between a basic card and one with a specialist finish then a potential sale would be lost.
A more typical basic e-commerce shot against a white background, although even here specialist lighting was required to avoid reflections in the silver tips of the pens.
The simplest and cheapest way to photograph products is against a white background with a simple lighting set up. This is the format most commonly used for product photography for e-commerce sites such as Amazon. Although this can work quite well for some products that have non reflective surfaces, very often this approach isn’t adequate.
Silver foil finish. At certain angles, the silver just appeared grey. It was important to clearly show the silver foil.
All reflective surface behave in different ways, reflecting lights and potentially the studio around them at different angles. Although, you can start with a lighting set up that’s been used before, this always needs to be adjusted and fine tuned. Its this aspect of the photography which takes the most time, something which clients who are new to product photography don’t often appreciate. When photographing products, often a fine adjustment to the camera position or the lighting of a few millimetres makes the difference between capturing the fine surface detail or loosing it completely. Fortunately, we have the right equipment and years of experience to hep us do this efficiently.