Product Photography - The ProcessFrom the first call to payment, this walk through gives you a good idea of the processes and requirements to get great product photography. for this example we are going to shoot shoes for a shoe retailer. We shoot 10 pairs of shoes totaling 100 images for £100.00 plus vat !

After the initial phone call to see what we did and how we do it the product has arrived, its a simple process of courier or posting the parcel to us at our studio in Bolton, we are located in commercial buildings so access for deliveries is no problem, our studio is equipped with red care alarm and smoke cloak, high security shutters and CCTV, we also use chubb safes for high value items.

The Process:
All items are booked in and checked for any transit damage.

Our booking in sheet contains detailed instructions for the person taking the shots, in this case we need 4 shots at 90 degrees and a bottom view, single shoe.

Items of clothing are hung and steamed ready for photography, in this case its shoes, so we must unpack and lace up the shoes where essence.

Keeping to the instructions given by the client we shoot 4 images front, back, left side, right side, sole, total of 5 shots.

These images go directly to our server, we do not use memory cards, all our cameras are connected to our network, files are backed up as they happen, we also never work on these files they are kept as masters.

The items are carefully repacked ready to be collected or sent back to the client.

Now the items are shot, the post production takes place, because the files are on the server, multiple users can work on the files at the same time, the images are cleaned and checked.

We use 27in Macs (4 of them) or Dell XPS Pc's (2 of them) depending on the staff members preference, we also use wacom tablets and a wacom 21ux touch screen monitor.

Because we use custom lighting we do not need to cut any images from the background, 95% of our backgrounds are white in the camera, this is the key to speedy and cost effective Product Photography. If there are any areas that need fixing we do that now.

Now the images are Web and print ready they are good to go, one extra step that included and if required is to resize the images down, our images are over 2300px wide and 2300px high and are about 2-4mb in size, these are BIG images, You get the BIG image for print or cropping out detail images from it, such as close ups, and you get a resized image.

Nearly there, the client had 10 pair of shoes, once finished this is what we sent them, 50 images (10x5) post produced in high resolution, 50 images resized to 900x900 for their web guy to upload, a total of 100 images.

From start to finish about 2-3 days.

An invoice was raised for 10 x £10.00 total £100 (plus vat) Thats 100 images in total for £100.00 Thats £1.00 per image.