[00:01] lot of us aren't talking about so much in vlogging and that is photography bit about product photography and what I'm going to show you may not apply to it's going to give you some really really useful stuff but first I got to
[00:16] excited about that we've been working [Applause] [Applause] on so a little bit noisier in here but a little while back we bought this you can see it's at work that's because we
[00:31] needed to be able to engrave these these are our plaques for our project 24 full-time income finishers but we decided instead of just
[00:43] having them generic that we wanted to put people's names on them cuz that's way cooler so we got this engraver so that we could do it but since we have this engraver it seems a shame to just have it sitting here all the time so um
[00:58] it started with me buying a bunch of these here's a kind of maroon one and I have their own custom water bottle that they got to design which was amazing and then next thing I knew I was like I put our Jiu-Jitsu emblem on my son's and I
[01:15] already had and next thing I knew everybody wanted one so I have a bunch literally asking me to make these so I I kind of turned it into a little bit of a
[01:27] side hustle we're making one now specifically so that we can take photos and put them up on a website so today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about product photography now you can use this for affiliate products
[01:40] especially now because if you don't know this Amazon used to have this feature where it would give you an embed code for literally product photos from Amazon
[01:52] that were approved for Affiliates to use and so people put these embed codes all over their websites so that they would be like followed the rules and pulling way you're not allowed to just save the images from Amazon and post them on your
[02:06] website that'll get you kicked out and it's a copyright violation all of a sudden not that long ago Amazon comes out and says hey guess what that Tool's going away and it's gone now you can't even get those anymore and all those uh
[02:21] image links they're all broken so we have to take our own pictures of photo of of the products that we want to talk about which I think is better by the way actually have the product you're recommending so let me show you a way to
[02:35] go about this now we normally just want to use Pro uh photos that just don't seem overly professional because we're bloggers right if it seems like you're some Pro photographer it's going to feel like a
[02:50] stock photo but there are situations where being able to take a highquality product photo is a good thing let me show you this setup that we've got going on now we decided it was time to take some
[03:03] high quality product photos not because the water bottles really needed it but we wanted to do something a little bit better for this so here's working on we're working with this uh business clear path we've actually
[03:17] partnered together and I'm helping them with their internet marketing they are sold on content and uh they're sold on affiliate marketing uh we're calling it ambassadors rather than Affiliates but it's the same thing because we happen to
[03:32] have people in our office Andrea who literally has a background in product photography we said we could take some pictures for so I have early product off of the line that we decided we needed to take some pictures of so here is the
[03:44] setup okay you don't have to do exactly this this looks pretty crazy and a a lot simpler than this but this is what we set up and I want to show you the elements of it so that you can apply this to your own situation first thing
[03:59] that we did was set up a backdrop this is just white craft paper it's on a roll um I do have a light stand with a bar that goes between them and so a couple of light stands and so the roll fit on it perfectly but really you could use a
[04:14] broom handle um and just holding it up with a couple of things and then put a just inexpensive white craft paper now this works perfectly because whether or not you can tell from because of the lighting um there's already some creases
[04:29] as you use it it's going to start to get creased and it's going to start to get a little bit dirty and so it's nice to be able to have your uh backdrop be something that you can just dispose of and pull off a little bit more so
[04:43] because we don't want to be wasters um my plan here is to cut off a piece take it home let my kids color all over it I got five kids at home um but then I can just pull out a little bit more uh just as needed and we can take some more
[04:58] pictures so we got a solid white backdrop now you may want a different product imagery it's nice to be able to have it look like the product is like there alone kind of in white space with a little bit of Shadow okay so there's
[05:13] the backdrop next thing we've got here is kind of our main light we have a light from the front it's a little bit off center from the camera which is a little bit of Shadow it makes it look like it's not just a fake computer
[05:27] generated image and it makes it feel more real we expect there to be shadows when there's light and when there's objects now this is pretty bright um and I'll explain a little bit the reason for that here in a couple minutes so we have
[05:41] could probably get away with just using whatever light you're using if you're taking uh any video could probably use a soft box but get the brightest bulbs in it you can next is we have a light over there on the side that light down there
[05:57] is a little low and notice notice how he's using these these are just they're part of a 5in one reflector but it's obviously not a reflector right those are just diffusing the light so that it softens it so it's not quite so harsh
[06:11] that light from the side is first of all filling things in so we don't get quite as harsh of Shadows the other thing that it's doing is putting just a little bit of an edge it sharpens the edge of the product makes it look pretty cool we
[06:24] corner that's a light that's always in well it's nice to have a little bit of overhead light again to help kind of fill in some of the Shadow so it's not quite so harsh uh Andria recommended
[06:38] actually like having it straight above um but it should be a lot dimmer than your main light from the front same with the hairl light the side light should be quite a bit dimmer this one in the front is by far the brightest all right let's
[06:51] I said that we have it very bright for a reason that's because we want to shoot with a very small small aperture which means if you have a camera that has the F stop it means a high number okay the
[07:06] little aperture hole which means less light is getting in but it also means that your depth of field is deeper so everything is going to be crisply in Focus so for these photos that we're going to take here in just a second I'm
[07:22] using an f-stop of nine but Andrea says she often shoots up at like F20 if she thing thing that we're going to do is we're going to have a fairly fast shutter speed I'm going to set it over to 1 over 200 that means 1/200th of a
[07:36] open it's also going to make it a little bit dark but it's going to make it so that when we take that picture it's quick so it's crisp now the iso we're going to set to wherever it needs to be now to get the color exactly how we want
[07:50] are the three corners between those three things we can control a lot of things but all of them have to be in Balance to get the light exactly how we want it okay let's talk about one more thing and that is with our lens I'm
[08:03] thing and that is with our lens I'm using my Sony a60 or Alpha 6600s and I'm using them with the lens that I'm using for taking these pictures is actually a for taking these pictures is actually a Tamron 17 to 70 mm lens it goes down to
[08:16] an f2.8 but we're not going that low on our f- stop anyway so that doesn't really matter the reason I want a lens like that though that will zoom and zoom in pretty far another thing I learned from Andrea is that we actually want it
[08:29] zoomed in she said to set it up higher like 5050 mm or something like that which means I actually need to back the camera away a bit it's amazing how different it looks I could bring the camera close and use our normal 16 mm
[08:42] lenses that don't have any sort of zoom in doing that it would look one way and do a zoom so that the object looks the same size it looks different and it looks better so here is your ideal setup some good lights whatever you can get
[08:59] one from the front a little bit off center one from the side and maybe one setup but if you're going to have all three of those you need to be able to adjust the brightness so that the one in the front is brighter than the others
[09:13] we're going to have our camera set with the f-stop pretty high um she said go no longer lower than eight in your f-stop number and then the last thing was just zoom in um so there you have it now I want to go ahead and take a picture with
[09:29] this exact setup and I want to show you what that picture looks like so we're going to take a picture of this bag right here all right now I have the bag actually turned slightly away just just barely turning away from us like that
[09:43] could take it straight on and that'd be just fine but I just wanted something interesting so that's what we're going to do then I'm just going to take a water bottle and we're going to see if this is any
[09:56] [Applause] different all right I'm going to show you what these pictures look like raw exactly as they
[10:08] are but then we're going to go through the next step which is we're going to do a little bit of of coloring and just a little bit to process those images to show you just a little bit of what I could do to kind of touch this up we're
[10:24] to try to keep it fairly simple I'm using Photoshop because I have it you're going to be able to do a lot of this stuff in really any photo editing software and you can even there's all sorts of free stuff out there but I have
[10:37] Photoshop so this is it and the cool thing is is my camera took this photo in thing is is my camera took this photo in a raw format so the file size is it's got a raw and a JPEG format the jpeg is already compressed the raw format is
[10:52] about five times the file size but it stores a lot more data which gives me a little more room to work with on like coloring lighting and stuff so when I coloring lighting and stuff so when I open that raw file here in Photoshop it
[11:05] around we could also do this in Lightroom I'm doing it here in Photoshop touching up while I'm at it okay so I'm going to click here this is going to give me some presets now here one of the presets here is under subject and
[11:19] food this first one here notice how it lightened it up a little bit so here's as it is that's if I select this first preset that's pretty good I like that a little bit better that one brightened it
[11:31] up even more but it made it kind of grainy see that that one kind of these these are all just kind of different ways I mean if I wanted something that looked kind of vintage I'm going to go with this first one so
[11:43] lighter a little bit brighter if I come down here and let's lighten up the that White's just getting a little bit lighter I can make it really light but that's not the same thing as just like raising the exposure see I make
[11:58] everything really light if I just go here and just raise up the highlights a bit then all the lighter stuff is going to get brighter or lighter um here I can do the same thing with the lights and that's going to pick
[12:11] up even more than just the highlights I can make the Shadows a little bit darker so not just all the dark stuff but all the Shadows so that's pretty cool I like that a little bit let's go here there's some other things let's go ahead and
[12:23] soften the texture a little bit I want to go too much I don't want it to start take the blacks and kind of darken the blacks just a little bit more make the whites just a little whiter now notice you can see here a lot better better
[12:39] than when I first took the photo just how crinkled up my bag is so I'm going these little spots so there's the healing tool and this one is a Content aware tool so it's going to try to heal it based on what's around it so look at
[12:55] that it took some of that wrinkle out of there I don't want to overdo it here but to go a long way you know I'm going to go back here to kind of the lighting and color here let's see what happens if I just raise up the Vibrance just a little
[13:08] bit see that I can make it really vibrant I think that looks good for what I'm doing here and really that looks pretty great so I'm going to export
[13:20] side by side and frankly I think that looks pretty good again especially given that I was using a wrinkled up bag the point here isn't to focus on Perfection or taking the best photos or being professional the idea here is that you
[13:33] professional the idea here is that you can take an imperfect setup you can take very basic lighting use a lamp if that's what you have right you can use what's of these basic principles that we've shown you in this video you're going to
[13:47] be able to take much better photos of products and all sorts of things even if you're not trying to go for like a studio look like this this is something like you would see on an Amazon product listing but maybe you're going for
[14:00] something that looks a little bit more real world still these principles of Photography are going to make those real looking shots just look a lot better the reality is is we want everything to feel genuine and authentic we want our photos
[14:14] to feel real we don't necessarily want them to look studio quality but there's them to look studio quality but there's real and then there's real if like my you're looking at this video and you see me right here and and I'm a guy with
[14:31] some lights behind me and a nice light on me and everything looks pretty good I mean maybe except this part but if you were to actually be in my office I just got to take a little video clip this is actually really
[14:44] embarrassing there you are here I am okay check this out this is my there's my soda I got some gum here I got all these like hand exercise tool things some peanuts look at my chair over there look at the I got extra exercise bands
[14:59] on the floor I've got mail here this is a mess but you wouldn't know that looking at this but does that make this look any less authentic we want to make real still look pretty good and that's
[15:13] hopefully what these skills are going to help you be able to do most importantly just try to make sure that we're making our content as helpful as we possibly can and honestly I think that's going to mean including a lot more good media in
[15:28] our blog posts which may mean some video content but also it's going to mean better job of illustrating the points we're trying to make in our blog post not just having pictures for the sake of having pictures that's it for today I
[15:42] hope to see you in our next video where we'll continue to talk about how you're going to make your content substantially better so that it continues to do incredibly well in Search and so it helps people in a way that earns you a
[15:54] [Music] there w