Placing Products on Pedastals - Product Photography

For all the evil that is ascribed by some to the world of advertising, it is good to remember that there are honest people doing honest work in the industry.  Everyone has to make a living... Some photographers work in a studio setting with various products, creating images that will eventually find their way into advertisements or some such arena.  Indeed, product photography can be a fun and challenging field, especially if there is a concept behind the shots of the product.  The following are some good examples of product photography done well.

Without wanting to get into the problems surrounding the diamond trade, I decided that the above was a good example for this blog.  Some might find my choice of the Tacori diamond ring ad above strange, but there are a variety of reasons that this is a good product photograph.  Granted, it looks like it was manipulated at least to some degree in Photoshop.  However, diamonds are incredibly hard to photograph well.  Anything reflective, really, has the potential to send your studio lights everywhere and just generally not look this brilliant.

I would not ever call myself a car person - all I have ever wanted was a nice, four-door Volvo sedan... And as this photograph clearly shows, a Volvo sedan can be a gorgeous car.  The lighting on the car is wonderful, and it does not suffer the toy-car syndrome that seems to afflict some car pictures (due to the removal of anything giving a sense of scale.)  On the whole, this is a really good photograph of a large product.

Normally I would say that a product picture fails if a viewer is not entirely clear as to what the product is, but for these things I just do not care.  They look incredible - I think they are some designer vase design from what I could tell, but I could be wrong.  The important thing about this photograph is that it is dramatic - it draws the viewer in, and makes the product incredibly interesting.  Sometimes, drama is the best way to makes sure that people will investigate and eventually buy a product.

-Kelly F.