Product Photography - The Pack Wolf

These lovely dry bags are for customers who want to fill them with items they want to keep safe, mostly from from water, rain, snow, or travelling and canoeing etc. So showing off the bags flat or in packaging doesn't really help the buyer image them in use. But we also wanted to mainly keep them on a crisp white background to focus on the product.

Ive never used dry bags before so even though it seems easy, I still needed a few lessons on how they work, how they are done up and what the straps should be doing. As the client will be approving the images, who better then them to give me guidance.

This particular product photoshoot issues were getting the rubber type material to sit right. They had been wrapped up tightly for a while and had creases. Making sure the logos and company branding were prominent. Conveying the sizes. and showing how the clips and straps worked.

So the bags were filled and the tops rolled over to the correct amount. The straps were positioned..... many times, as there were a few options. The studio lights setup and tested for the correct exposure.
With products another important decision is the depth of field, or how much of the image is in focus. Always more critical on smaller objects.

It's usually handy to have a few details shots. Not only does it help show off the quality of a product and how it works, but it adds variety to the viewer, and keeps them interested. Obviously too many photos and they will get bored.

Another style of photography is to give the viewer a few more visual clues as to how they can use the product. We decided some overhead shots centralised around the bags, themed to different activities. This one being canoeing.

The setup looks simple but it took a bit of planning. We needed to keep the bags the focus of the image, decide and source the props needed, and the correct feeling for the background.

We did about seven themed shots. There is more to it than you think. Keeping a consistent look means deciding everything before you start. Camera position, studio lighting positions, down to how you're actually going to trigger the camera and check the images.

If the camera isn't far enough away from the subject, objects will look distorted and will be awkward to look at. You can't really use a wide angle lens to get closer to the setup for this reason, and realistically there is only so much vertical space we have. So I mounted the camera on the ceiling and remote accessed the camera, that determined how much actual space I had to work with, and that worked pretty well.