AFFORDABLE ECOMMERCE PACKSHOT PHOTOGRAPHY

Based Near Newark, Bryony Photography has 10 years experience managing high volume photography studios globally for the Fraser Group and is well placed to deliver outstanding ecommerce and creative product photography with great quality images, and a fast turnaround.

So, What is Packshot Photography?

In it’s most basic form, the term packshot refers to a close up picture of a product for advertising purposes. However, the term now tends to be used to describe ecommerce photography used for web sales and is less so utilised to describe the “hero shots” used in advertising photography. We also use the term “amazon ready” to indicate that product images will be appropriate for 3rd party selling sites like amazon, alibi, Tmall etc. The specifications being that the images are within a certain size bracket, have a pure white background and that the product fills a certain percentage of the frame.

Why Hire a Local Photographer?

There are lots of Large companies offering Packshot and ecommerce photography, and you may feel more comfortable hiring a large business for this, safe in the knowledge that they are likely reputable & can fulfil your requirements. Look, I’m not going to preach to you, but having worked for one of these large agencies when I was younger, I would like to offer some insight. They mostly hire staff on minimum wage, zero hour contracts. Which means young creatives are getting paid the absolute minimum, and sometimes not at all. Despite having staff on minimum wages, the large photography companies do not actually charge less than your average Freelancer… again… trust me… I worked for them, and I have had 3^rd party dealings with them. When I was working for one of these companies they charged an average of £25 per product for ghost mannequin shots, and they were bringing in an average of £3750 a day for one studio, whilst their overheads on staffing were a mere £540. That’s a DAILY profit of £3210, and a yearly profit of just under a million for one small studio. All of that profit is lining the pockets of the owners, and shareholders, and not the creatives and talent.

This may not be a good enough reason for you to hire local, but I hope it will at least make you consider taking a look at your local photographers and creatives and investing in working people rather than big corporates.

GHOST MANNEQUIN PACKSHOTS

This is the industry standard for ecommerce apparel photography. Contrary to popular belief, most Ghost mannequin images are not actually photographed using a “Ghost Mannequin” because most of these mannequins produce results which are well below the quality of the alternative methods of production. Using a combination of two images (a foreground shot, and a neckline image) and some photoshop wizardry, Ghost Mannequin images are produced to give your customers a clear and polished view of your product. Lighting is standardised to create consistent and pleasing product shots, along with exceptional retouching to even The more images you have per product, the more informed you customers will be on their purchase, Improving purchase completion rates, and minimising returns.

Ghost Mannequin Photography– PRICES STARTING AT £12 INCLUDING RETOUCH

Tabletop Product Photography

Tabeltop photography or Lighttable photography is suited to smaller items like accessories and footwear. Shot using a combination of techniques, and equipment, tabletop photography will highlight you product offering with clean crisp imagery, beautifully lit to highlight quality, or minimise flaws. Retouched to perfection on an amazon ready white background, these shots are versatile enough to use on websites, social or 3^rd party shopping platforms.

Tabletop product packshots – PRICES STARTING AT £8

Ecommerce Model Photography

It is proven (though i cannot find a study to cite right now) that a combination of a mannequin or tabletop image, alongside model images is the best way improve conversion rates and minimise returns. Including model imagery allows the customers to see how the product sits on a real person, how its fits, how it flows and how it shapes around a real form. It also allows you to re-enforce your brand identity through model selection, gives your greater freedom to show off USPs and gives you additional imagery for your social channels.

My personal preference for ecommerce model imagery is a dark white / soft grey option, as it looks less stark and more premium than the ‘amazon ready” look for models, but can be whitened to be applicable for 3rd party selling sites. However, the sky is the limit with model imagery, and there is a fab trend towards shooting colour pops for web at the moment.

Flatlay Product Photography

Flatlay photography is similar to Tabletop or lighttable photography, with the distinct difference that it is photographed from above, or from a birds-eye view. Flatlays can take the form of ecommerce photography on white, or creative shots for advertising. These kinds of shots are very popular for social media, and can be a great addition to websites and social platforms.

CREATIVE PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY

Great quality creative product photography is so versatile, and can be used for web banners, social media or print. Whether it’s conceptual advertising photography, or photography for social media, Bryony Photography can work with you to create fit for purpose imagery for your budget.

BESPOKE Advertising PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY – POA

Get in touch to discuss your Pack shot photography on hello@bryonyphotography.com or head over to the contact page.

Affordable High End Jewellery Photography

Based in Nottinghamshire, Bryony Photography has 10 years experience shooting high end jewellery Photography for some of the best fine jewellers and costume jewellers in the UK.

High End Jewellery Packshots

This is the most common style of ecommerce photography, with the products displayed on a white background. Ensuring that all products are photographed to the highest standard, with smooth metals and sparkling gems. These industry standard images are multipurpose and can be used across many platforms including 3rd party hosts like amazon.

Your products will be shot to your bespoke requirements, using your style guide, retouched to a high standard, and supplied in both high resolution and cropped for web.

High End Jewellery – Prices starting at £18 including retouch

High End Jewellery Retouching

Using a combination of high end technology, software and special retouching techniques, Bryony Photography delivers great quality retouching at affordable prices. Metals are smoothed, with unsightly reflections removed and reshaped. Gems and stones are sharpened and brightened, with all colours on the product being corrected to daylight appearance.

Jewellery Retouching – Prices Starting at £5

Creative Jewellery Photography

For great quality creative jewellery lifestyle shots, Bryony Photography offers bespoke photography packages for group shots and individual pieces. Whether the image is for web banners or magazine covers, Bryony Photography can offer you a great package to fulfil your requirements at an affordable price.

Bespoke Creative Jewellery Photography – POA

Jewellery Photography for Social Media

Perhaps you want to bulk up your assets for social media, and you want high volume great quality imagery, but you dont want to pay campaign prices. Bryony Photography offers retainer packages for Social Media imagery to help you keep your Insta on fire with great quality, on brand pics.

Get in touch to discuss your jewellery photography on hello@bryonyphotography.com or head over to the contact page.

Is Instagram Killing the Creative Process

There’s a fair amount of hypothesising on this subject floating around on the web. Is instagram killing creativity, is it killing photography, is it killing… blah blah blah… On the whole i think we all believe Instagram is killing a host of different things. But whether the deluge of similar content posted by influencers is killing creativity in general? Lets explore that for a sec.

Influencer Style

Instagram content, despite being user content, has somehow become its own sort of style. The “influencer style”, if you will. Dependent on what subject matter you’re into there will be a sort of instagram style guide to abide to in order to be safe in the knowledge that you fit it, dont push boundaries, and get a nice safe amount of likes and comments.

Okay yes, some of it is samey.

This issue is exacerbated by the fact that the majority of users on instagram are not ‘creatives’ and there is no creative process involved to ensure originality. Influencers, standing in front of mirrors, in a white room doing the “influencer shoulder”, filming on their iPhone, peddling their wares like modern day market sellers.

But, Why?

We often ask ourselves “why?” when the reasons are simply justified as “why not?”. There is little reason to put in more effort to be different, when being wildly different is not valued on a massive platform like Instagram. Humans are not inherently driven to be genuinely different, call it the tribal mentality, or the “Sheeple” effect, but there are millions of examples of people going out of their way to follow the grain. At school we’re taught that being different, or being “other” gets you picked on. Our survival instincts implore us to follow the pack with our actions to ensure safety in numbers. Retail industries feed on and propagate our desire to “be different within safe parameters”. Faux individualism is the key here, making us feel as though we’re unique, but only within the safe limitations of the game.

Originator, not Influencer

So how do we add spice to the blandness. Stand out in a sea of homogenous, artificial similitude. Brands and users are growing tired of the similar content and are longing for original content, new ideas, new visuals and pushing boundaries.

So what will we see in the New-20’s? We hope to see new ideas, with brands taking new directions, pushing different ideas, and not peddling the same old influencer looks. And the brands that dont update their game may find their engagement dropping.

Instagram is forever changing it’s algorithms, so there is always the possibility of another update to their user experience which will change the way brands will have to engage with the platform.

Seek and You Shall Find

With all of this said, if you are committed to the search, you will find some awesome content on Instagram which is unique and quirky, which doesn’t follow the rules and pushes boundaries. Try using some weirdly specific hashtags for what your into and hopefully you’ll find some awesome new people to engage with – just dont blindly trust that your Discover feed has your best interests at heart… they are there to make money remember.

Photographer and Content Creator

What is Online Content?

Content in its most vague definition, is the “stuff” that makes up most websites. Content is blogs, videos, imagery, social media posts, polls, animations and illustrations, infographics, graphic design etc. Engaging content makes your followers, readers and customers want to keep coming back to consume what you have to offer. In the modern world it is not sufficient to just be, to exist in the webosphere because you will fade into obsolescence. In order to stay current, and remain at the forefront of your consumers minds, you must be constantly creating consumable relevant content. You are the zookeeper and your customers are the animals, feed them or they may leave (or worse… consume you).

What is a Content Creator?

Content creators take many forms, and most content creators are specifically within one area or a small selection of areas within the genre. Many large marketing agencies offer content creation as a service, due to the access to many freelancers, but they charge a premium for this and it can work out very expensive. Content creators are inherently creative, up to date on pop culture, tech wizards, and proficient in creative industries.

How are Photography and Content Creation Linked

Freelance Photographers make great content creators, because we are often well versed in many of the fields, Photography, Video, Design and blog writing.

For instance, despite being predominantly focused in photography, i studied Visual Communications at university, which taught me everything from animation, illustration, lens based media, etc. And most photographers have an art background too, for instance, i’ve done classes in book binding, screen printing (along with many other printing techniques), drawing, painting, typography etc.

Most photographers are trained in a multitude of disciplinaries both manual and digital, so are well placed to assist with content creation in all its assorted manifestations.

Can I Create My Own Content

In short, Sure, but not if you want it to be good. Many startups create their own content because they do not have the budget for outsourcing. However, people in these industries are inherently creative, have studied in these areas, practice their crafts, invest in the correct tools for the job and (the downside) charge accordingly. Experience, knowledge and practice will mean that they do a much better job than a novice and paying for the service will be well worth the payoff of having great engaging and visually intriguing content for your platforms.

Content for Instagram

Great quality content for instagram is imperative for building your brand online identity. Product shots, model shots, “user content”, short videos, memes and lifestyle shots are all great ways to keep your followers engaged with your content, grow your following and translate that into sales. Instagram is predominantly a visual medium, but its also important to create engaging and genuine accompanying text and quirky specific hashtags (dont over do the tags people!)

Content for Facebook & Twitter

Facebook and Twitter are where you can engage with your followers and customers as the expert on your subject. Here, information and entertainment are the rulers. You content can be more substantial, but your other areas of content can feed nicely into here. It is also a great place to run competitions, and promotions.

Blog for your Life

Seriously, blogging is key to growing your content. Writing about subject related to your business or brand, will help draw people into your website. Your blog content will need to be more in depth copy, with accompanying imagery and videos to help break it up.

Creating Versatile Content for Multiple Platforms

If you are smart about your visual content creation then you can use the same assets across multiple posts, on multiple platforms. For instance, one trick is creating wide landscape imagery, with a core central visual which can then be cropped up for multiple uses. See below for an example of how a professional will shoot imagery which is appropriate for all your platforms.

Creating Video For Social

I’m just going to say it straight up, if you want incredible video content, then get a videographer. However, if you’re just wanting a little bit of additional content to support your imagery then asking your photographer to create some video is a great way of “Not handling the product too much” and can be very cost effective in terms of samples, timelines and setups.

“User Content” for Social Media

One way of creating lots of content for social media is gifting out samples to “influencers” in the hope that they post photos of your product. There are some pitfalls to this; the quality of content can vary a lot, there is little in place of “terms of engagement” once you have posted the products so sometimes you may get shafted and not get anything in return, great influencers charge a lot of money for this, and free influencers tend to produce unimaginative crap (sorry but it’s true). Many influencers are using a cut and paste format for their social, because they are copying someone that copied someone that copied someone else…. everyone is a basic b!tch on social and if you dont believe me, head on over to Insta_Repeat and see for yourself, and the best way to get original and interesting content is to get a creative to create it for you.

Take the Next Step for your Content Creation

Get in touch today to discuss your options for photography, blog writing, video and other content creation for your brand.

How to Manage a Negative Client Experience.

We’re nearly at the end of 2019, and i have sadly had my first serious complaint of the year.

Yes, occasionally i have had clients who have had constructive feedback for projects which i have then corrected / reshot etc. and supplied them imagery which they have been ecstatic with. I pride myself on being able to keep my clients happy.

Having a client who is unhappy with the work that you have produced feels awful, and as a freelancer, you do everything in your power to rectify the situation and leave your client with a smile on their face.

But, what do you do if a client turns nuclear? This is what has just happened to me honestly it made me feel like shit.

I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the project, even though that would feel wonderfully cathartic, but what i am going to do is show you what the client wrote in my “review”…

Initially i was pretty hurt at the clients review. Aside from this particular snippet, it felt like personal attack on myself and my work, which i am not too proud to admit – hurt me in my feelies.

So after moping around for a couple of hours feeling sorry for myself, feeling useless and rubbish, i decided to put this feeling to a positive use and turn my frown upside down.

How to learn from negative feedback.

First off, in normal circumstances, identify if this is a salvageable relationship… in my case it is not, so i’ve written off the client and owed monies. But, in most cases a relationship is salvageable, and you just have to decide whether it is worth the effort to fix.

Secondly, make this a learning moment and study what happened and identify what went wrong. What variables (within your control) could have been changed for a different outcome? Here are mine for this project:

Manage expectations prior to the project commencing, outlining deliverables and clarifying brief.
If the brief or deliverables change then amend the costing appropriately.
Do not ignore red flags indicating an incompatible working relationship

Thirdly, it’s important that you don’t let negative feedback make you feel like shit for too long. It’s bound to bring you down, but you can use this experience to do something positive with it.

Here are some ways that you can cheer yourself up (without involving alcohol) after getting negative feedback:

Check in with your favourite client/s just to say hi
Write a positive blog post
Re-organise your favourite shots in your portfolio
Do a personal project ; food for the soul
Have a look at your positive reviews

Also, it is always worth remembering, that no matter how rude, or mean, or personal an unhappy client may become; People are rarely being dicks for the sake of it. Everyone is human, and people respond differently in difficult situations. Keep your composure, measure your responses and always represent the neutral face of your business. Never get riled up, do not meet them in their territory, always in yours. If you respond consistently with understanding, empathy and kindness, they will struggle to remain angry and annoyed. It is hard to consistently meet pragmatism with anger and ,whilst you may not attain a disney -happy-ending with you and your client riding off into the sunset on the back of an awesome project, you may at least maintain your composure in the process.

Yes the relationship may not be salvageable, but your dignity will not be compromised and at least you will not have a hangover of regret once you have licked your wounds.

In the spirit of this blog post, i want to show you a handful of curated reviews which i used to cheer myself up after my explosive project.

Keep on keeping on and 2020 will be awesome.

Jewellery Photography – Subalian

I was approached by an agency requiring shots for their clients new jewellery ranges. The images required were standard ecommerce imagery, with a high end edge and a selection of lifestyle images for male and female audiences alike.

For these images i raided my closet, and cupboards to find suitable textures, from a chiffon dress, to a garden gnome (yes you heard correctly).

Cosmetics Still Life Photography – Glossier

I just love Glossier products, they’re so stylish and chic whilst still having a sort of cute K-beauty feel (even though they’re not k-beauty).

This wasn’t a paid project, i actually just bought some of these products because i like them and thought what the hell, why not photograph them before i totally ruin them by keeping them in my handbag.

Its always important as a photographer to test different lighting setups and concepts when you’re not actively working on paid projects. Like with an athlete, it helps to affirm the muscle memory of lighting setups, helps expand creativity by allowing experimentation with no pressure on the result, and it gives you a little extra fodder for the social media machine.

Cosmetics Photography

Product Photography – Christmas Flatlays

I have spent the last few months doing lots of christmas flatlays for my clients in the run up to the festive period.

For some, this would be a bit much… several months of tinsel, fairy lights, christmas music (optional… but i do partake)… but luckily i BLOODY LOVE CHRISTMAS.

I do… i love all of the festivities, the candles, mulled wine, low lighting… a season filled with Hygge (dutch for cozyness).

So here is a small selection of my newest christmassy shots to celebrate this christmas time.

Gift Box Photography – Trendy Tendency

Gift Set Photography – Cozy Mum & Me

Festive Product Photography – Chic & Raw

Product Photography – Chic & Raw

Chic & Raw came to me to launch their new product. A small startup with a duo product offering of candles which are created using natural fragrances and essential oils to promote love, friendship, deep inner healing and peace.

The images had to embody a feminine serenity and natural ingredients, whilst also minimising reflections on the metallic rose gold finish. and also highlight the USP ; two pieces of rose quartz embedded in the candle.

Lifestyle product photography

Product Photography – Kerello Skincare

I get to work with a lot of great startup brands, and one of the perks of the job is getting to see products way before they’re launched.

Because of this, i am quite used to having images embargoed until the launch date. It’s very important for clients to be able to trust their photographer, as we are often privy to the pre-production elements which go into a product launch.

Several months ago i was contacted by the guys at Kerello Skincare to discuss the photography for their product launch, and i am so happy to be finally able to show the images know that the brand has (Very successfully) launched.

If you want to check out they’re fab Facemask, head over to the Kerello website. Their facemask is Vegan Friendly, and contains no nasties like fragrances, parabens, alcohol or phthalates.

They wanted the lifestyle product photography to embody this freshness with bright and airy shots.