E-Commerce Photography Tutorial

In this video, Karl explains five key things you should consider for e-commerce photography, whether you are a professional photographer working for a client or an online retailer looking to photograph your products in your own small e-commerce studio.

Shooting product and still life images is important for many businesses – there are many small online stores, Amazon resellers, Etsy shops or eBay stores all needing to display their products in the most favourable light. The techniques for achieving reproducible results are fairly straightforward and allow you to photograph batches of many similar sized products under the same conditions over and over again.

Concepts covered in this tutorial include:

  • Preparation and planning for e-commerce shoots
  • What equipment you need for e-commerce photography
  • Lighting setups for e-commerce photography
  • How to photograph e-commerce products
  • Post-production and retouching e-commerce photography

Other related classes you may enjoy include:

To learn more about e-commerce photography, please read the full article on e-commerce photography. For more examples of how to photograph products and e-commerce, take a look at our full product photography course.

Comments

  1. It would be nice to also know how you price these. Full day of shooting plus retouch pr. image. Or a start-up fee and then retouch pr. image etc. Thank you.

      1. Hi, yes I have. From what recall, that´s mostly covering dayrate based shooting, usage fee, pre-production etc.. But for e-com you have said in one of your videos quote: “The more you shoot in a day, the more you´d earn.”, and you mention packshot photography “..£5 for 100 images or £2 for 500 images” in a pricing video. But I can´t find a good way to calculate a pr. image fee.. I know what I need to earn pr. year, pr. week, pr. day etc. But not how to transfer that to different types of pr. image fees. A dayrate is of course optional, but not always a good “carrot”.

        1. Hi Marius, pack shot pricing has to come down to the complexity of the initial setup and how many shots and how long they will take and how much post work. For example I could create a packshot setup for bottles of wine or shampoo or similar in about an hour and then I could photograph about 1 per minute if I really had to and to a standard that they wouldn’t need and post work. So in a half day if went non stop then I’d shoot 4 hours x 60 mins = 240 bottles in 4 hours. Less cups of tea etc etc then lets say 200 bottles, so if your half day rate was £1000 then 1000 divide by 200 shots would give you a pack shot rate of £5 per shot BUT there’s no way I’d do them that cheap as I know the client will want them resized, put on a memory stick etc etc so I’d be doing them at what I think works for the client and worked for me so for example I’d say at least £10 per shot. The client gets 200 ready to go pic for £2000 and the photographer gets £2K for half a day.

  2. Hey KArl, I have been following you since a very long time, I really appreciate for the contribution in growing people skills, Can you please help working with Product shoot Table like manfrotto. How can we get the best out of it for faster ecommerce results? is it really helpful or not?

  3. Is there a video from the series e-commerce photography, where you actually shoot photos? I’d like to see how you position lights for a pure white background, camera angles, camera settings and so on..I have seen this same video on YouTube, I was hoping to find some more information on the paid website.

    Please let me know.

    Thanks

    1. Hi Niccolo, please head to our product photography section in the top menu and then view the thumbnails and you will find several classes related to packshots or white background photography. You might also like to checkout some of our previous live shows.

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