Product photography is about far more than just photographing products. Product photographers have a range of skills, experience and access to facilities which ensure that product photography is used to sell products, not merely record them for posterity.
Taking photographs of products can very easily result in little more than a reasonable pretty picture showing what the product looks like. Or at least, how a camera perceives the product under certain lighting conditions, which is almost certainly not the same way the human eye sees things.
But what needs to be remembered is that product photographers are employed to help businesses sell their products, not just demonstrate what they look like. This, combined with a deeper understanding and appreciation of what is going to be done with the product photographs, or at least, what could be done, is essential in making sure that any product photography session is approached with a clear purpose in mind.
Product photography is an art, as well as a science, and combined with this duel requirement it is also necessary to have a very clear appreciation of the way the world of marketing works, and how businesses and promotional marketing is perceived by consumers.
As consumers we have become ever more cynical, increasingly critical, and extraordinarily judgemental. We have had to be, in order to cope with the daily barrage of marketing information pelted at us from all sides from dawn to dusk - and beyond. For any business wishing to succeed it is imperative that any and all promotional material cuts through this noisy world of marketing, and reaches its intended target audience.
Product photography can achieve this, because visual images take less time to process than reading text or listening to a broadcast, and a visual image can communicate a vast amount of information, values and create sub-conscious associations in a split second.
This is, however, both an advantage and a potential trap. Because in the right hands a qualified and experienced team of product photographers can create a product photograph that slices through the competition and delivers a neatly packaged message direct into the heads of potential customers, which says a great deal about the product, the company and reasons why the customer should be interested and find out more.
But in the wrong hands, product photography can be a disaster. It is still possible that the message will be delivered quickly, since product photography in almost any form is likely to beat text based, video based or audio based advertising in terms of speed. But if the message is confused, or implies values, associations or statements which are undesirable, incorrect or misleading, then the damage can be disastrous.
It is very easy to look around you at the examples of product photography which are available in so many different media forms, from magazines and catalogues to web page advertisements and leaflets, and see nothing more than product photography. But look more carefully at those which really have something to say, and aren't merely pictures, but powerful marketing messages.
Often the differences can be relatively subtle, but never underestimate the power of subtlety. Product photographers are highly skilled at including subtle effects and using very clever techniques to transform a simple product photograph into a marketing package which sells both the product and your company, cuts through the noise and delivers the message directly to your intended target audience.
How do they do this? What is it that product photographers do that is different from those who simply believe that product photography is little more than pointing a camera in roughly the right direction and pressing a button?
To answer such a question would require at least as long as the number of years' experience professional product photographers bring to the table, along with time to explain the many different ways in which props, lighting, technical setups and post image digital manipulation can all be used in various combinations to achieve a wide range of effects.
It would also help to have a lengthy list of contacts for everything from props and models to lighting, sets, locations and many other professional service providers; having a state of the art photography studio and camera equipment also help. Certainly product photography is considerably more than pointing a camera and pressing the button, unless of course you're more interested in the photograph than in selling the product.
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