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The psychology behind the 10:10 in watch advertising photos

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There are plenty of tips and tricks for making the best out of product photography. Other than gear, lighting, composition, and other photography-related strategies, there are also a lot of psychological tricks involved in taking a photo that will sell the product.

One of these strategies is typical of advertising photos of watches. If you’ve ever noticed that they’re usually set to 10:10 in photos, there’s a good reason behind it. It’s all about psychology, and in this article, we’ll tell you more about it.

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How to – and how definitely not to – photograph mirrors

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What’s the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to photograph? A bicycle? A French horn? Silverware maybe? What those things all have in common is that they are all highly reflective objects, and often present some issues when photographing them.

But what would be even more challenging than a shiny object? Have you ever had to photograph a mirror? That surely would be the ultimate in product photography challenges, and the internet of course has a hilarious collection of people trying and failing to photograph mirrors for sale. But what is the correct way to photograph a mirror? DIYP spoke to South African commercial photographer Carla McMahon to find out the best way to do it.

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Learn to shoot wine bottles with this brilliant lighting breakdown

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How many times have you been browsing an online wine catalogue or a magazine and stopped to really appreciate the photographs of the bottles? A lot of work goes into designing wine labels and the photography of the bottles, even just the boring old e-commerce shots on white, are actually quite technical.

UK based commercial photographer Del Vincent came up with a very clever way to show exactly how he photographs wine bottles, and what each light and reflector card does on each part of the bottle.

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Hard light vs soft light and how it applies to still life, food and product photography

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The concept of hard vs soft light comes up all the time, particularly on YouTube, but it’s typically in relation to portraits and other photographs of people. It’s rarely given much air time when it comes to other genres where you have control over the light, like food and product photography or still life.

But in this video from V-Flat World, commercial product and food photographer Hudi Greenberger walks us through the principles of hard and soft light, how we can apply them to our small scale scenes and the overall effect that different relative sizes of light source will have on your shot.

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This simple product photography walkthrough offers everything you need to know to get started in product photography

Product photography can be such a fun genre of photography to explore, even if you don’t want to do it for a living. Perhaps you just want great pictures of your own products to sell in your Etsy store or maybe you just want to show off your new toys in an effective way to your Instagram followers. Whatever the ultimate use, it’s still product photography and if you want to do it well, then you’ll want to watch this video.

Coming from Lucy Martin, this product photography walkthrough goes through what she considers to be the essentials of what you might need but also explains why you might need them. Everybody’s needs are different and Lucy goes through several different options that are useful for the budget-minded photographer as well as how you can expand it in the future to produce the best product shots possible.

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How to shoot translucent product photos on a white background with just a couple of speedlights

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Shooting transparent and translucent objects on a white background can often be very tricky. You want to be able to show off the product itself without it being overpowered by the background behind it. It can be difficult to light in a way that makes it stand out, but it is definitely possible – as proven by thousands of listings on sites like Amazon, eBay or Etsy.

Well, in this video, Dustin Dolby at workphlo takes the mystery out of shooting translucent and transparent items on a white background so that you can photograph your products in a way that helps to make your or your client’s product listings stand out.

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This is how you shoot silverware with perfect reflections with only 1 light

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It’s all business in the front and party in the back with Dustin Dolby from Workphlo‘s latest product photography tutorial video. This time he’s showing us how you can get some very professional looking images of silverware, using very basic gear: just one Speedlight.

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Square’s new app helps you take “professional” product photos… Or does it?

Digital payments company Square has just launched Square Photo Studio, a new app that lets you take and edit product photos in a few clicks. It’s useful for small businesses who sell their products on online platforms, and it allows you to take “professional” photos. But how professional are they, really? Can they replace dedicated photographers who would take decent shots of the stuff you sell? Let’s see.

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How-to: Fast focus stacking for food and drink photography

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When you’re shooting close-ups or macro you often find yourself at f/16 and still not getting enough depth of field. So that’s when focus stacking can be a really useful tool. It sounds complicated and there are lots of in-depth tutorials telling you that you need x,y and z special equipment to make it work.

But it actually doesn’t have to be that complicated, particularly if you just want to get the whole of a glass in focus for example. In this video, Joanie Simon from The Bite Shot shows you how to focus-stack drinks in a very simple way.

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How to create clean simple product shots with just one light and a bit of AI

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Have you ever wondered how you can create high-quality product shots using just one speed light? Dustin Dolby from Workphlo show us how to do just that in his latest video, and it is really very simple. I’m a huge fan of using minimal gear if you can, and I love to use just one light source when possible. As you can see from Dustin’s final images you can create a very solid looking e-commerce type image with this method.

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