Creative lighting at your fingertips!
At Asset Factory, we understand the importance of brand visibility and brand awareness. You need to be able to tell your story through captivating content and utilising a variety of lighting techniques is one of the best ways to enhance your product photography. You may think this is the exclusive domain of traditional photography, but it’s all possible at the touch of a button using our Live Machine. We took on the challenge of exploring the following lighting techniques, and the results are amazing (even if we do say so ourselves)!
Look 1: White Background E-commerce
A crisp, white product photography backdrop is vital for any brand with an online presence or ecommerce business, but these images can often come across as a bit…flat. It doesn’t have to be! Changing up your lighting with these simple product photography tricks will bring your ecommerce content to life.
Choose one main light source, which is your “key” light. This will help to avoid multiple shadows and cross lighting, which can look unnatural. The other side light will then act as your “fill” light. Pulling the fill light down will darken one side, creating more contrast and darkening the shadows. This contrast is what helps to emphasise texture and garment details, and gives depth to your image. Farewell, flat images!
This fashion photography technique is perfect for a soft and neutral look, creating an accurate representation of the product and ensuring customer loyalty and trust.
Look 2: Colour Blocking
Adding a colour to your photography backdrop that matches your garments can create a look that’s easy on the eye, but with a bit of pizazz. The images will flow together nicely, look professional, and actually be enjoyable for your consumer to look at. Which is what we want! Different background colours and textures will react to your light settings differently, so it’s also an easy way to change up your look.
With your key light turned up and the fill light lowered, harsher contrasts and directional shadows are created. Lowering the back lights then pulls the model even further away from the background. This is what we refer to as a “halo-like” effect. It creates separation between the backdrop and the model, illuminating the model and creating a clear focal point for your consumers in your product photography.
Look 3: Shadows
Elevate your ecommerce business content even further with harsh shadows and props. By lowering all the lights other than your key light, and playing around with bounce boards to create reflections, you can easily create these long shadow effects. Placing temporary walls and plinths behind the model will force the shadow to stand upwards and directly behind.
Note: These temporary walls are super easy to make! Pop into your local hardware store and pick up a piece of MDF, a stand, and some screws. Paint the wall white and you’re good to go.
The areas of the model and garment that you want to highlight should be positioned facing the light. It tends to look best if the light is hitting your model’s face and chest, creating ‘fall off’ on one side of their body.
Look 4: External Lights
Take it up another notch with Live’s manual product photography settings! The machine can be switched from “simple” exposure settings, to manual, which means you can get personal with the different depths, directions, and shadowing.
These images were created by lowering the Live Machine’s lights and placing an external light on one side of the model. The less opposing light coming from the Live Machine, the harsher your external light will appear. To exaggerate the shadows, we opted for a lighter coloured floor, which the dark photography backdrop then contrasts against to add mood and depth.
Fall out will land on one side of your model, creating a split light effect on their face and body. Similar to the above images, it’s important to place the pieces you want to emphasise into the light. The areas facing the external light will appear lit, and the areas away from the light will be dark and moody.
Simple things like moving the angle of the external light, adding light from the Live machine in and changing manual exposures can change this look drastically. It’s all up to you!
Learn more about Asset Factory
Boost your brand visibility and brand awareness with Asset Factory’s Melbourne photography studio, and see how our other product photography and video production services can help your business create engaging, impactful content.