My top 5 tips for maximising your time SPENT ON DIY product photography!
Are you on the hamster wheel of designing, making, shooting a product leading to an inconsistent and in-cohesive visual look and feel?
I totally get you! Us makers get so involved in the designing and making process that sometimes the photography and marketing of those products can be a little bit haphazard and rushed.
One of the biggest challenges small handmade business owners face is having enough time to do EVERYTHING needed to run their business and achieve their goals. Let’s face it - makers have to wear a whole lot of hats and sometimes some of the non-making stuff can feel like REALLY hard work!!
Makers need to:
Research, design and make their beautiful prototypes and products
Photograph them in an engaging and compelling way in different formats that work for their website, newsletters, printed materials and social media marketing (and goodness our images have to work for grid posts, stories AND reels now too!)
Create marketing content to help them tell the world about their brand and what they sell
Pack and post the products to customers
Order supplies needed to make your products and consumables required to run your business and support your brand!
Answer emails, DMs and provide excellent customer service
Book-keeping and finances
And the list just goes on…. Plus we also have to have a life, spend time with loved ones and have some all-important ‘you time’ without working 24/7
So with all that going on, it can sometimes be a real challenge to carve out style, shoot and edit compelling images for your handmade business.
And whilst it would be easy for me to say just hire a photographer (like me!) to do all that for you - it isn’t always the right time! Particularly early on in your business when funds might be tight and you face the costs of building your business and taking your products to market.
Thankfully it has never been easier to create your own beautiful images and I want to show you that you can really maximise your time spent photographing your products.
My top 5 time-saving tips for maximising your product photography time
So what are my tips for creating a good suite of imagery to help you achieve your business goals with minimal time and effort!?
1. Batch your DIY product photography into half or full day shoots!
Don’t shoot products willy nilly as you make them! Instead of capturing products individually as you make them, I recommend carving out a good block of time (say a half or even better a full day) and shoot as many products as possible in this time. It takes a bit of time time (often up to 30 minutes or more) to get everything setup to take your product images so imagine how much time you are wasting if you do all this setup work and then only shoot one or two products? Or even worse, you don’t spend the time needed getting the lighting or styling just right leading to sub-par images that don’t do your products justice!
When you batch your product photography you get economies of scale in terms of shooting and editing. So it is better spending 1-2 half days or a full day capturing lots of gorgeous images.
2. Create 2-3 styling setups for your brand that have a consistent look, feel and colour palette that work well together and look cohesive and on-brand!
When you shoot willy nilly you run the risk of creating a different look and feel for every product and this isn’t great for your branding. You definitely want variety, but you want all your images to have a cohesive look and feel in terms of colour palette, feeling, lighting and props and backgrounds.
And you have probably found that if you post the same kind of image day after day on Instagram then engagement drops as your audience gets bored! They want variety!
So a good way to get round this is to create 2-3 styling setups for your brand that are different but that work well together in terms of mood and colour palette. Then you can run all the products you need shot through setup 1, change the setup and shoot setup 2 etc. It means you always have a good variety of images to choose from, but that everything looks cohesive and on-brand!
Its fine to use some of the same props across the multiple setups but you do want them to look and feel slightly different. I like to have 2-3 backdrops and shoot some simpler setups and some with a bit more going on.
Examples of straight on (90 degree angle), 45 degree angle and flatlay shooting angles. Beautiful cards by Ruby Ashley.
3. Plan your shoot in advance and create a shot list. This is your master checklist of images that you definitely need. This can be as basic as a hand-written list, or can be as sophisticated as a hand-drawn story board. Whatever works best for you! So if you need a group shot of a collection for both your web banner (horizontal crop) and category image (square crop) you don’t miss those essential shots. And there is nothing worse than finding out when editing your images that your favourite shot doesn’t quite work in the aspect ratio you want it to! I have created a shot list template that you might find useful!
4. Shoot each product at AT LEAST 3 different angles and crop using multiple aspect ratios (Portrait, Horizontal and Square) so your images can be used for your website, product pages, newsletters, socials etc! All those images have a different ‘shape’, don’t they!? And it can be hard to visualise how you will use your images until you see them.
So when you have gone to all the effort to plan and setup your shots, don’t just take one shot and move on. Shoot at a couple of different angles at the very least (my favourites are straight on, at 45 degrees and flatlays!) and make sure you take some wider shots and closeup shots so you can crop those images as your heart desires.
This means that your images will work harder for you. Win, win!
And don’t forget to capture some images with negative space so you can add text and other marketing messages!
5. Do a quick cull of the images taken to identify the ones you want to edit. You never edit all the images captured during a photoshoot - that’s just not a good use of your time, AT ALL! Not all will be worthy of editing so a quick cull to identify those you want to spend the time editing is really worthwhile. Remember your time is precious!
I do my culling in Lightroom and I review all images and give the ones I want to edit a star so I can easily find all those I want to look at a bit more closely and take the time to edit so they look exactly how the customer will see them. Remember to keep your shot list handy so you can make sure you are creating a final gallery of images that do everything you need them to do!
Example of rating images in Lightroom so I know which images I want to spend time editing.
I typically spend a couple of hours editing post shoot so it’s important to factor this into your schedule. I love Lightroom as it enables me to edit a photo and then copy those edits across the rest of the images. Now I still need to go in and tweak the exposure of all these images and perhaps do some touching up, but this time-saving hack gives a really consistent look and feel to your images.
So I hope that I have shown you that batching your DIY product photography is the absolute best way to maximise your very precious time so you can spend less time creating your images and more time doing what you love! As that’s the whole reason you started your handmade business in the first place, right!?
So please, please, please book some time in your diary in September for a DIY photoshoot so you have plenty of images on the run up to Christmas! You’ll thank me for it later!
Until next time!