Lets talk about photographing your products for shopify

Many of my clients use Shopify as a platform to host their ecommerce site from.

I totally understand why, Shopify is very easy to work with making it accessible for anyone want to sell their products on and have many beautiful templates available for you to build your sites on.

The stumbling block that many of my clients have is the photography, you can of course take the product photographs with your smart phone but because of the sensor your packshot photos are not going to be sharp enough. As a product photographer I would always recommend a DSLR and second to that a Mirrorless camera, what ever you use as long as you have a good lens you can be sure to have a good sharp image of your item. My preference in cameras in Canon 5D, I use a mark 111 with an array of lens's, for detail close up shots, such as jewelry, print, stitching, labels and logos  I use a Canon 100mm f/2.8, I also use a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens which gives great image quality, sometimes I get out my favorite 24-70mm Canon lens, its so versatile and lastly if we are out on location another beautiful lens to use is my Canon 70-200mm f/4L USM

Lighting is also very important too, in my product photography studio I use Bowens 500w lights, I have several of them and a whole array of modifiers including, umbrellas, soft boxes and reflectors, they all have different uses, and depending on what sort of effect I want to create on my product I may will flit between different ones.

Sorry Im going a bit off topic, back to photography for Shopify, depending on your budget it is a very good idea to take several different images of each product, this way you you can show different angles and also detail shots so your shoppers are fully aware of what they are buying, with clothing I generally do a front image, back image and sometimes a couple of closeups of labels, button holes and interesting stitching. Shopify also recommend that you upload your images as squares 2048 x 2048  pixel size product photographs.

Another important tip to remember when thinking about your product photography is to remember continuity is key, it is very confusing for your shoppers to have lots of different style photography, it is also bad if you are trying to build a brand, the best solution to this is to have all of your packshots photographs on either a clean white back ground or a soft grey I think looks very elegant, do not have your photographs over fussy as too many distractions takes away the impact on the actual product you are showing in your packshots.