Marius Serban is a designer and a photographer with 22 years experience in the field. Regardless of the task at hand, designing a checkout page for a 9 figure Silicon Valley company, or photographing for Amazon sellers, his goals was and remains the same: conversion.
A technical approach of product photography…
Lighting
• Lighting is the MOST important key of a great product photo. If you take a picture with a $50,000 camera in very poor light conditions, that picture will turn worse than a picture taken with an iPhone in great light conditions.
• Source of light – the bigger the light modifier, the softer the light, which will compliment the model better. As a general rule, I use 3x 7′ umbrellas for my lighting. However, if I shoot something like a sport product, where I need more defined shadows, I either use a smaller umbrella, or a small reflector.
• 3x 600w strobe lights will be enough for most scenarios, but sometimes I’m using 4-5 depending on how much space I need to cover.
Aperture
• Aperture will determine the amount of blur your picture will have in the background.
• The smaller the aperture, f11-f14, the sharper the background will be. However the smaller the aperture, the more light you will need.
• A lot of photographer choose to use higher aperture (which will make the background blurry) just because they don’t have enough light.
ISO
• The higher the ISO, the more noise you will have in the picture.
• For my studio shots, I am at ISO 100 with an aperture of f14-f16. For my on-location pictures, I will go to about 320ISO max, so the pictures will be clean as much as possible.
Lenses
• I am using my 24-70mm lens for about 90% of my pictures. The tighter the space you have, the smaller the focal lens will need to be. Sometimes, like if I’m shooting in a tight laundry room or party, 24mm is barely enough.
• However, I am always trying to shoot at over 50mm (59mm is the equivalent of what our human eyes see).
• The wider the lens, the more deformed the subject will be (which is not ideal!)
• For super detailed shots, I love to use my 100mm lens
