Place of design

Part of our work involves shooting products for websites.  We are currently developing a new website for Nottingham Cleaning Services.  Part of this build included us cataloguing all of their products, which will be part of the product listings

Benefits of a product shoot
Getting professional photography done is a key part of a successful web store, and will make or break a potential sale.  NCS have realised this, and this is why they commissioned the product shoot

The advantage of getting a professional in is cost and consistency.  Tackling many hundreds of photographs for the uninitiated is daunting and hard work.  And in the end, costs more in man hours than it does to book us on a day rate.  This shoot was one and a half days which equates to £1200 of photography.  That sounds a lot, but when you factor in that we have produced and edited more than 350 images, the cost price works out at a very reasonable £3.42 an image.  This fee includes the many days of subsequent post processing

• Cost – a day rate for a photo shoot will save you money, compared to commisioning on a per shot basis
• Quality – Professional images are much higher in quality, which equates to improved conversion and ultimatally more tunover and profit
• Consistency – A professional shoot and subsequent post processing will be more consistent and even than doing the job in-house or mixing and matching images from different manfacturers.  Consistency is a way that customers gauge the professionalisim and quality of a website

The Shoot
The shoot took one and a half days.  We took our professional studio flash equipment to the client’s warehouse, where they had already cleared about three by four square metres for us.  We popped a ground sheet down, taped everything down to be safe, and then set up our bespoke shooting table, full length backdrop and lighting

Workflow
Because of the variability of the products, and the huge amount of products that needed to be shot in a short time frame, we set up a fairly generic lighting set up, and then shot the products in batches according to size, tweaking out the lighting as needed

Cameras
For this shoot we chose a 14MP Kodak Professional DCS full frame studio camera tethered to a laptop.  We shot straight into the laptop, allowing us and the customer to easily review things on a shot by shot basis.  This improved the workflow for the day, and produced brilliant high resolution images.  Other images were taken on Nikon professional digital cameras

Lighting
The lighting varied through the shoot, but in the main we used a combination of 2 huge soft boxes, grids, reflectors a snoot on between two and five professional studio flash heads.  We use radio triggers to fire the flashes.  Radio triggers add a lot to the safety of a shoot, as it is another set of cables that don’t need to be used

Working with the client
Between us we produced a worksheet for the shoot, and we shot and prepared the products, as the client picked and located the products.  The shoot went really smoothly and had a minimal impact on the clients business.  This is one of the advantages of us doing a shoot on the businesses premises

The target usage
The usage for the photography is on a website, at a size of no more than 800 pixels in any direction.  The images have been produced at a file size of 4500 x 3000 pixels! This is actually adequate for most print applications as well. We supply the images in the required colour space and resolutions, and sharpen accordingly.  We also provide the full sized unsharpened TIFF files to the client in the event an image is to be used for print

Here are a few random images from the shoot

Did you know we can shoot:

• Products on location
• Products in a studio.  We can also deal with model hire for you
• Corporate portraits and head shots
• Award ceremonies and events
• Company balls and events
• Conferences and meetings
• PR and publicity shoots
• Makeovers and fashion

Benefits of booking with us

• As website designers, we understand the needs of the internet clinet, and how the images will fit into a website
• We offer a true one stop shop process.  Instead of dealing with one firm of phootgraphers and another firm of designers, and bouncing back and forth at both the design and photography and product entry stages, you can deal with one company
• We can shoot precicley to suit the site design, cosmesis and feel

Book us today
If you have a warehouse or shop full of products that you need high quality photographs for, and don’t want to pay the usual £10.00 per image, call us.  Our equipment is portable, and we only require mains power and a reasonably sized space to work in.  The benefits to your business can be tremendous

We can arrange anything from a small shoot, to every product you sell.  Call us on 0115 845 8953 for details

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