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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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How to photograph violins like the Stradivarius magazine

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I get asked to photograph some pretty interesting things, and sometimes these things create some unique problems to solve. Here I’ll take you behind the scenes of a recent shoot for a violin maker and show you how I photographed this series of a violin in a way that is both a document of the instrument and also a beautiful wall poster.

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How to create a dramatic ad-worthy beer pour shot with minimal gear

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We’ve featured some of Workphlo‘s brilliant product photography tutorials before, and Dustin Dolby doesn’t disappoint in this latest one. In this video, Dustin shows us how to capture a dramatic beer pour advertising style shot using just basic equipment. He explains that it’s fun to evoke some motion in an image, and pour shots are surprisingly simple to create. The entire set-up is compact and uses only an entry-level DSLR and 3 speedlights.

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How to shoot easy white backgrounds for either products or portraits

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It’s one of the oldest and most fundamental techniques when it comes to shooting both portraits and product photography in the studio. But it’s also one of the most misunderstood and difficult to grasp for a lot of newer photographers. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about the ubiquitous white background shot.

In this video, Rob Hall walks us through the process of getting two white backgrounds. The first demonstration is in a portrait setting, showing how the background is lit vs the subject and how to prevent the background from flaring into the lens. In the second, Rob sets up a small product shot using a light table. Both are lit quite differently but achieve the same result.

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Check out these eight 3D printed photo & video tools designed to make your life a little easier

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I put off getting a 3D printer for the longest time. I didn’t want to get one just for the sake of having a new toy that I’d get bored with, so I held off getting one until I felt I had a genuine need for one. Now, I have five – the most recent of which are the Snapmaker 2.0 A350 and its predecessor, the Snapmaker Original, and I find them absolutely invaluable.

I’ve been using them recently to print a bunch of tools and accessories to help me with my photography and filmmaking. Some of them are workflow and organisation accessories while others are actual tools used to create content. So, here, I’m going to talk about some of the most useful things I’ve printed lately.

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