In the ever changing landscape of all things e-commerce, digital marketing and online advertising, one thing still holds true; the visual appeal of your products and services are often the first interaction potential customers have with your brand. In this article, we'll compare the DIY product photography vs professional product photography services. Just like fixing things around your home, choosing between DIY and hiring a professional services involves weighing the costs, benefits, and potential pitfalls. Whether you're capturing product shots with a smartphone or investing in a highly skilled product photographer, this decision impacts your brand's image and success in any highly competitive market. Discover the pros and cons of each approach, understand the skill and experience required, and make an informed decision that aligns with your brand's goals.

Product photography plays a vital role in marketing, advertising and branding. When done right, meaningful, consistent, creative and well produced product photography can drive sales and increase profit while simultaneously helping your company establish a recognizable and reputable visual identity for your brand.

Lights, Camera, Commerce: The Significance of Product Photography

Product photography is like the beat that keeps your digital marketing heart pumping, the lead guitar in the rock band of your visual marketing strategy. Product photography allows you to highlight the unique features and benefits of your brand's offerings. Whether it's the intricate details of a piece of jewelry, the functionality of a consumer tech gadget, or the texture of clothing, visual representation aids in conveying information that words alone may struggle to express. Customers want to see the benefits that they're are getting by purchasing your product and product photography is the bridge that fills that gap.

Going a bit further, beyond just showcasing features, product photography also offers the opportunity to be highly creative and strategic about your brand and who your brand serves. Product imagery can create a feeling and a vibe that can ultimately be used to build a visual narrative and lifestyle around your brand and it's portfolio of products.

Professional commercial product photography is an essential tool for any business wanting to create visually appealing and effective marketing and advertising materials. Having access to creative and unique, high-quality product photos can help capture the attention of your ideal customers, showcase product benefits, and ultimately drive more sales. More specifically, when it comes to building a reputable brand, the quality of the product photography that you put in front of your target audience is of utmost importance because it serves as a reflection of how your brand is perceived in the marketplace when compared to your competition. Maintaining consistent, high quality visual brand standards will help re-enforce the visual impact that your product photography has in your marketing and advertising efforts. (I wrote an article a while back explaining some of the benefits of commercial photography for your business. I highly recommend checking it out.)

How To Choose The Right Product Photographer For Your Project?

No matter what type of product photos you need, it's important to choose a professional product photographer that has the right skillset for your project. My best advice is to look through a photographer's portfolio and make an assessment based on the following criteria:

The purpose and intent of commercial photography is to promote or sell a product, service or idea. Whether that photography is being commissioned by a small business or a international brand, the imagery is used to create brand awareness and ultimately make the end user of the imagery more money. In today's ever changing digital landscape, high quality commercial imagery is more important than ever. With the continued, rapid growth of social media, delivery service apps and online shopping experiences, it's important for businesses to have highly creative, well produced and visually alluring imagery of their products and services in order to attract and retain paying customers.

Commercial Photography Used In Branding

Commercial photography can be used to create a strong brand identity for your business. Having access to visual marketing assets that demonstrate visually pleasing aesthetics on a consistent basis, can prove to be a very valuable tool in building a reputable visual identity for your company. It allows your business to develop a memorable and recognizable brand that will stand out from the competition as well as differentiate your products and services from the offerings of other companies in your respective industry.

In addition to being a full time commercial photographer and digital artist at my company Digital Art That Rocks™, I'm also a musician. In fact, I've been playing guitar for well over 20 years now! Not only do I enjoy playing, but I also love to write and record my own music when I have time. Just like photography, music provides yet another outlet for my creative brain.

Passion Projects Are Good For The Soul

No matter what career path you've chosen, I think that it's super important to have passion projects in your life. What is a passion project you ask? A passion project is simply a hobby or activity that brings you joy in your spare time. Passion projects allow you to set goals for yourself, challenge your mind and give you something to work toward. Having passion projects in your life can be rewarding, self-fulfilling and just plain good for the soul. Best of all, when you you feel good, that vibe resonates all around you. It resonates in your family life and in your workplace.

As an adolescent, I used to take guitar playing pretty seriously....like practice 10 hours a day seriously (only on weekends of course, because I had to go to school, duh). Anyway, I've alway been an artist. But at one point in my life, I really, really wanted to be a professional musician and just wanted to write songs, play guitar, be in a rock and roll band and tour. All of this being said, this article is going to be a bit different than some of the other articles I've written on my blog over the years, but hear me out.

When most people think of architectural photography, they often think of luxury homes, hotels, resorts and perhaps historic structures. Over the years, I've become an expert in photographing unique and unconventional commercial architecture. I've photographed what I consider to be some of the most unique and challenging spaces any commercial architecture photographer could be asked to photograph.

Well Produced Imagery Can Make A Huge Impact In Your Digital Marketing & Advertising

In the world of digital marketing and commercial advertising, well produced commercial imagery can make a huge impact in how your products, services and brand are perceived by consumers, especially in an oversaturated marketplace. If you work in a marketing or advertising role, it's important to educate yourself on the types of imagery you might need in order to help sell your companies products and services. Learning how to articulate your photographic needs can help you make more informed decisions that ultimately lead to more impactful and meaningful photography. This in turn will help promote the health and wellbeing of your brand's image and longterm growth strategy.

In a previous article, I wrote about the 4 most common types of product shots. Being that my name has become somewhat synonymous with the industry term "hero shot," mainly due to the high end product photography that I'm known for producing, I thought I'd write an article to expand a bit more on what a hero shot is as well as the important role that it plays in the world of digital marketing and commercial advertising. I'll also provide some sample images from my commercial product photography portfolio as well.

While the internet & shipping industry have dramatically changed and transformed the way we perceive, buy and sell products and services, one thing that hasn't changed is the need for highly impactful imagery to help sell those products. Whether you need your products photographed on a white background for an e-commerce website or epic hero shots for your next ad campaign, with so many competitive products on the market these days, the need for high quality product imagery is more important than ever.

The Role Product Photography Plays In the Success of Your Marketing & Sales

If the success of your brand depends on selling the very products your company designs and manufactures, the role product photography plays in that success should not be understated. When done right, product photography helps consumers visualize how your products fit into their life and ultimately helps make your company more money. There are so many levels to that statement, so let's put it into perspective with a hypothetical scenario.

Chances are, the success of your business and brand rely heavily on selling products and services. We as humans are visual creatures. And when it comes to marketing and advertising, having the right visuals to promote your products and services can make all the difference. This is because people are wired to respond to visual marketing. In fact, "studies suggest we are 10X faster at taking in image-related information. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text. It takes up to 2X as long to process and recognize words. Our brain is made for visual processing. People remember 80% of what they see and do and only 20% of what they read" according to Entrepreneur Magazine.

Taking these statistics into consideration, it's clear that we respond to visual information. That's why hiring a professional image maker to help visually communicate your brands message is vital to increasing your chances of success as it relates to your marketing and advertising strategy, sales goals and brand recognition.

PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY CHICAGO

Are you looking for product photography services in Chicago? Why limit yourself to just Illinois? Like the marketing team at Taco Bell likes to say, "think outside the bun." Hi, I'm Brian Rodgers Jr. I'm a commercial photographer/digital artist and owner of a company called Digital Art That Rocks™ based out of South Bend Indiana, just 2 hours outside of the windy city!

I specialize in creating heroic commercial product photography with an emphasis on the post-production process. My clients use the product imagery that I create to build brand awareness and increase sales through means of marketing, advertising and educating their customers. Having access to amazing photographs of the products you design, manufacture and sell provides a lot of value that ultimately pays for itself.