Watch the Painstaking Process Behind a Product Photoshoot

Photography Tips  •  Product Photography

Ever wonder what kind of work goes into creating those glossy commercial photos that are often found as advertisements in magazines? As you’d suspect, there’s more to it than just snapping a couple photos of a product and calling it a day. As Rob Grimm shows us in the video below, there is a lot of work to be done even before the photographer thinks about picking up a camera:

For starters, Grimm has to prep the bottles which he’s photographing for this particular shoot. This entails giving the bottles a few coats of clear, waterproof polyurethane to protect the labels from splashing water, which will also be part of the shoot.

Grimm hand paints details onto the bottle to replicate ice chips and condensation.

Once the bottle is perfectly decorated, Grimm photographs it, then goes to work on the drinking glass. It’s vital that the glass is spotless. Grimm uses a white cotton glove when handling the glass and wipes any and all spots off using a dust-free rag. The ice that goes into the glass is actually an acrylic glass that he methodically arranges in the cup.

Grimm uses acrylic ice cubes rather than actual ice cubes.

He then moves the cup with ice to the shooting area, fills it with the amber liquid, and holds up a small gold reflector behind it, moving the reflector around until the light shoots through the drink just right.

The last part of the shoot required an assistant to drop the oranges into water as Grimm snapped the photos.

To conclude the photographing part of the session, Grimm asks his assistant to drop several oranges into a tank of water. Like in the other photographs mentioned above, it’s was necessary to use strobe lighting to help freeze the motion of the water and properly illuminate the scene.

Once all the images are finished, Grimm sends them off to post-production, where they are composited together to create the finished image.

It’s a long, tedious process. Clearly, there’s more to this kind commercial product shoot than meets the eye.