Mobile Product Photography with an iPhone at Home

1. Introduction : Hey, what's up? Hey. Not much. I'm just working on my resume applying to jobs. Wait. I thought you wanted to become a proto photographer or content creator or even open up your own brand. What happened to that? Yeah, and I still want to do it, but I don't have a camera yet. So I decided to work in an office for a while, save up for it, and then I will start my creative career. What if I told you you've got everything you need to create? What do you mean? You've got an iPhone, right? You can take pictures like this. Is this a joke? You took this photos with an iPhone. I don't believe you. Let me show you. Let me show you how to create amazing product photos for your clients or for your own brand, with an iPhone only. Watch my skill share course now and you will learn how to come up with creative ideas for product photos. Where to find props, how to style products with those props and create beautiful compositions. How to optimize your smartphone settings for the best results, how to take photos, how to select photos, and how to edit them all on your iPhone. Don't need any experience for this class. It is perfect for beginners. Hello, my fellow creator. My name is Stancy. I'm a product photographer and a YouTuber. I started working as a photographer when I was 15-years-old, and pretty quickly, I realized that a professional camera does not make you a professional photographer. It's all about your creativity and your skills, not about the gear. Honestly, it's usually the people with really expensive cameras that produce mediocre images because they rely on the camera equipment too much. Thanks to my skills and creativity, I live in the Canary Islands and my days are filled with creative product photography projects, making youtube videos and hanging out at the beach. A lot. The thing is, you already have everything you need to get from point A to your dream. Don't think like, da. We will become a creatives. Instead, think like today is the day one of me becoming a creative professional. The first most simple step you can do is take my skill share course. Let's dive deep into that. 2. Course Project: Create 3 Product Photos: Thank you very much for taking this course. I designed the courses project to help you get started on the creation of your portfolio. I invite you to choose one product that you personally like and find beautiful and take three different photos of the same one product using your Smartphone. To demonstrate to everything, I'm going to use natural skincare products by a brand Mesnatura, and after each class, I'm going to give you an actionable step. So by the end of the course, you're going to have three product photos, ready for submission, ready to get some feedback. Don't let all of the valuable knowledge that I'm about to share with you disappear from your mind. Use it to get the first feedback on your work and get started with that creative career already. To complete this project, you will first come up with three creative ideas for product photos using three methods that I'll share with you in the next class. You'll find props and backgrounds to use for a project, and you won't need any artificial lighting for it. I'll teach you how to use the natural sunlight. You will style products with props and create well balanced compositions using tip see share with you in one of the future classes. You will also learn how to use your iPhone for product photography and editing. Don't forget to submit your project to the project gallery that you can find below and leave a review to my class when you finish it. I'm specifically asking you to create three different photos of the same one product so that I can give you more useful and actionable feedback on your work so that you are more equipped to create high quality portfolio projects. If you want to learn more about starting a creative career, check out the resources section under the course because it created a very useful PDF guide with the six most essential steps that I took to start my creative career. Also in a resources section for this course, you will find a super detailed PDF guide with all the things to do and all the tips that will help you to complete this project. If you need to stay more organized, use it and check out the course details for any additional resources and links that I left for you. I'm very excited to see what you will create for this course. Let's move on to the next class. 3. How to Come up with Creative Ideas for Photos?: Creativity rules over gear. Having really good gear is a bonus. Having creative ideas is essential. How to come up with creative ideas for product photos. The first method is researching ideas on Instagram, Pinterest, B hands, and brands websites. The second one is sketching your own ideas on a piece of paper. The third one is using props for inspiration. Researching ideas of other photographers is absolutely essential because it helps you to develop your own sense of style, your own taste. It helps you to see what's currently trending and way your work stands in comparison to the industry professionals. Recreating someone else's ideas is the best way to learn. When you find an idea online, and you're trying to deconstruct it and think, how did they do that? You learn the creative skills so much faster. I create my best work when I start with researching ideas of others. I find a few things that I really like, and then I try to combine them. Because new creative ideas is in fact a few old ideas combined together. I put my own twist on these ideas. I created with my own props, with my own products, with backgrounds, with my own lighting, with my own style. It becomes something completely unique. Another thing I recommend you to do is to research the brand and the product before taking photos. Go in their Instagram on their tik tok on their website on their pinterest. Check out what they're currently creating. What's their aesthetics like? What's their style? Can you make it better? Can you put your own twist on it without taking a completely new direction? When you're looking at the brand's content, think about three words that will best describe it. For Musa Tura, it is natural, it is elegant, and it is simple. These three words will be a great starting point for a photoshoot. The second method to come up with creative ideas of product photos is to sketch them on a piece of paper. I start by creating borders on my photo. I just created a rectangle, 8 centimeters by 10 centimeters because usually Instagram posts have four by five ratio, and I'm just going to sketch my idea out without thinking about it too much. I just want to let the creativity flow, and you don't need any skills to do it. You're doing it just for yourself to develop your idea. There it is. Done. Will it look good? I don't know. I'm going to have to try it, and I'm going to have to let my creative process take me places and maybe improve it and maybe create something completely different. But now I have a starting point and I don't need to think about this idea anymore. It's no longer in my head, not occupying the space for the creative act to happen. Next method to come up with creative ideas is to use your props and products for inspiration. I really like just sitting down and playing with what I have and seeing what I can create with it. Already, I really like this composition, but what else is possible? If I just put this round tin on a round tray on the edge of it, I could create a nice minimalistic composition obviously with a different background and some nice harsh shadows to add some interest to it. That will be a great shot already. Maybe I could put the circular tray behind the product on a pedestal to frame it. Could use this prop like this to clean a product on it and it's on a tray. Why not? Obviously, I can create multitude of compositions just like this one. In next class, let's talk about how to find unique and versatile props for a product photography. It's your turn, research the brand and the product, define three words that describe it, find inspiration online, and sketch ideas out or create a moodboard. When I'm creating a personal project, I make a moodboard on Pinterest or Google slides, or sometimes I just screenshot a bunch of ideas on my phone. If I'm working for a client, I use mill note. This is a professional tool to make moodboards and collaborate with other people. Every time I put a picture on my moodboard, I make a little note why I did that. Is it because of the background color of funky texture, some shadow or an angle from which the photo was taken? Want to be very transparent when I work with my client. I'm going to leave a link to Mila note for you in a description to the scores as well. 4. Where to Find Props for Product Photography? : Beautiful props can transform and boring and unoriginal photo into something unique that drives the sales up and gets more ice on the product. How to find them? The first way is really simple, just look around your house. You might already have something that will work for your shoot, plants, baskets, trinkets, bowls, vases. All of that can work. Second ways to gather some natural elements like flowers, branches, rocks, and soil. They will work especially well for natural products and they are free. The third way is honestly my favorite because it allows me to have really unique props that nobody else will ever have. That's finding stuff on the street. Yeah. Here a couple of photos that I took with things I found on the street. I can even tell you what those are, but they look amazing on photos. So I just found these today on my daily dog walk. I don't know what this exactly is So stone cutoffs. I thought they will be perfect for my shoot. I already can come up with a lot of different configurations, how I could use them. For this project with miss Natura, maybe for some other shots as well, so I'm going to keep them with me for a while. I took some beautiful shots today with a golden hour, and I'm very happy about that. So keep your eyes peeled for such stuff on the streets. And other ways to shop for items in stores. I personally real like going to the home decor shops and finding things and coming up with ideas as I'm in the shop, looking at the things. But make sure you can return them, ask about the return policy at the cash desk. Otherwise, you're going to have to keep everything you got just for that one shoot. That happened before, and I'm so traumatized. Because I thought the 14 day return policy is commonplace, but no. So brands are like you can have a voucher or exchange items for something else, but getting your money He. Just saying, be careful about that. Regarding the backgrounds, you can use paper from the craft store. That's what I do a lot. I just go and choose paper in the colors that work best for my ideas in the brand aesthetic. You can also buy specialized product photography vinyl backdrops. If you spill something on them, nothing's going to happen. You can use them over and over again. You can also use some fabrics or some textures around your house. Maybe you have some beautiful tiles or maybe a table or maybe a carpet. Carpet? No, I take that back. I can't come up with an idea where carpet will be a good option. Lastly, you can also buy props online. I recommend getting something like these. These are professional, hand crafted, concrete props from Bitonon. I really like working with this props because they come in all these fun shapes. I'm never running out of creative ideas with this, and I even got a couple of clients just because I posted about the props on my Instagram and YouTube. They reached me out, and we're like, Hey, can you create something with this for Abra? So some of them come without texture and some of them come with the texture. So they're really versatile and they are high quality, which means I don't need to photoshop them. I can literally take photos with my iPhone and it will be ready to go. Have you seen those foam props? I'm not a fan of those because they require a lot of photoshop to remove that foamy cheap texture. And I reached out to Don Phone and asked for a little discount for all of my fellow creators. You'll find it in a description down below. I hope you'll find some really cool props for yourself. Now I'm going to share with you a few tips on how to select props specifically for your project. First, go and look at the references on your moodboard on interest on Instagram and just see what kind of props you like and what would work best for your style and this brands aesthetic. When choosing props around your house or online or in a store, just make sure they fit your color scheme. For example, for a natural product, I would choose natural colored backgrounds and natural colored props. A great thing to do is to look at the brands color scheme on their website or Instagram and try to find props in that color scheme. Other thing to keep in mind is the size of your props. You don't want it to become too overwhelming. Sometimes it can be bigger than a product. In the case of this round cream and the tray, the tray is much bigger, but since it's a neutral color and I can use just like a little bit of this strain the picture it will work. Just use your sense of style, your taste to determine if this prop is going to work or not. My last step is to use props that will make sense for this product. For skin care, I can use a little basket to store it in, I can use like a makeup bag. I can use gasa or Chade roller. I can use a mirror, like a bathroom shelf, something like that because it all makes sense with the skin care. I'm not going to use a glass of water with it because it doesn't make sense. A glass of water would work with supplements or vitamins. Now it's your turn, gather the props and backgrounds that you will need for your three photos of the same product. In the next class, I'll talk about using the natural light for product photography. 5. How to Use the Natural Light for Product Photography?: How to use the natural sunlight for product photography. There are two types of light, soft and hard. On a cloudy day, you will get a soft light. The sunlight is diffused by the clouds. It helps to create soft and gentle look for the photos, and the shadows will be soft as well. On a bright and sunny day, you will get hard light. It's strong and it creates harsh shadows with crisp edges. You can create a soft light out of it by diffusing it. You can put a wide sheet of paper or some fabric in between the light source and your sin. There are also specialized photography diffusers to do that. To what time of the day to take photos? In the morning, right after the sunrise, and in the evening, right before the sunset, you're going to have this beautiful golden hour that will turn your products to gold. Photographers love that time because everything looks more rich and beautiful and the shadows are long, but be aware that it can change the products packaging color. In the middle of the day, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, you're going to have very harsh sunlight. It's going to give you very short shadows, and you will usually end up with some glare on the product on the label. It's generally not the best time to take photos. Somewhere in between those points of the day, it's pretty good time to shoot. Recommended to just play with your products and props at different times of the day, see how it looks like and find the best places in your apartment where it will be convenient for you to take photos in. How to position the product to the light? The easiest way to start is to position your product to a 45 degree angle to the sunlight. You can also position it to 90 degree angle to create some beautiful shadows on the side. You can even try to position a product directly in front of the sun, but make sure to take pictures from a lower angle, so you don't see the shadow of your smartphone in the shot. And you never really want your product to be back lit because it will all be in a shadow, so don't put it in between your smartphone and the sun. How to manipulate the light? I already mentioned that you can diffuse the hard light, but what else can you do? You can create some beautiful light plates and reflections using everyday objects. Here are a couple of photos that I took using glasses that I found at home decor shop. I recommend you taking a flashlight, going around your house and pointing it at things and seeing what comes out of it because that way you can truly create something unique. Also, I want to recommend you to always be on a lookout for some light place. This morning, I saw beautiful shadows from a tree on a table and decided to use it for a photo. Using no references, no sketches, just my inspiration in a moment. I put down a piece of paper to use as a background, a prop from Biton Ton, that, by the way, I use as my home decor, so it was the easiest one to reach for. I placed my product in the paper packaging and just the bottle together and voila. I also decided to take a photo with multiple products together. I just placed them so their shadows don't touch each other, and here is the result. The third way to manipulate the light is to bounce it on a product, is to reflect it. For example, you have a product, it's positioned to the 45 degree angle to the sunlight. One side of it is very nicely illuminated, but another one is really in a shadow and you want that to be brighter. With the artificial lighting, it's pretty easy. You just put one soft box here, another one here, and the product is illuminated from both sides. But when you're using the natural sunlight, you can just put a white piece of paper on another side of the product, which will bounce the sunlight on another side of this product. The next way to manipulate the light is to actually make it darker. If you used a black piece of paper instead of white one, you will make the side of the product more dark. This is great for moody pictures if you're really into that aesthetic. The last way to manipulate the light that I'm going to share with you today is to create some beautiful sunbeams. Just like this one, right here on the table. I didn't plan on it, but it's perfect. You can use two black pieces of cardboard or two boxes or whatever you have, just place it in front of the sun, and then separate it a little bit as much as you want. This kind of sunbeam already works like a prop for this picture. I can just put my product in there, position it to how I like it. I really like to eliminate the logo, the name of the brand. Take a photo and it's done. It's beautiful. It's minimalistic, it's simple, and it's gorgeous. How many adjectives can I come up with this idea? A lot. But I'm going to stop. Choosing what kind of light you're going to use for the photo is very important because it will define the style of the whole project and never shoot in the poorly lit environment because it's just going to reduce the quality of your photos and make them pixelated. Now it's your turn. Look at the moodboard that you created and see what kind of light is used for each of the reference pictures. Or look at your sketches and think what kind of light would work best for your ideas. Knowing some ways of light manipulation, maybe you can come up with some new ideas. In the next class, you will learn about styling products with props. 6. How to Style Products with Props?: Styling products with props can be quite overwhelming and challenging, especially at the beginning, but I promise it gets so much easier and intuitive with practice. Now I want to share with you my tips for styling products with props and show you some examples. A quick disclaimer. All of the tips that I'm about to share with you are not rules. I just want to help you get started with styling. Don't try to implement all of them at once, and use each tip individually as a starting point for your photo idea. Do not overcrowd the photo with props. This can be distracting from the product. Everything in the photo should support the product. Second tip. Use props that make sense for a product. If it's skin care, you can use a mirror, a jade roller, gaa, baskets, makeup bags, you get it. Tip number three, if you want to put all the focus on the product and really make it the here of the shot, put the product in the middle. Next step is to use the rule of thirds, which means is to visually divide the picture in three parts vertically and horizontally. That will create some points of intersection, and it's just more appealing for the human eye to see objects in the intersection of those parts. Leave some space, but not too much around the product. If you leave too much, it is going to look awkward and the products will not be the main focus of attention. Tip number six is to frame the product with props. Tip number seven is to play with props and product until you find a well balanced look. That's why it's so important to look at the pictures on Instagram Pinterest and other website to develop your own taste and sense of style. Tip number eight is to have odd number of props. Again, this is just more appealing for the human eye. Don't try to make a supersymmetrical picture. Tip number nine is to add an element of chaos. Don't strike to make it super perfect. Making a beautiful light beam or reflexion or some light play is one of the great ways to add the element of chaos to your photo. The last tip number ten, you can style the product laying flat on the surface, it can stand or it can lean on something, or it can float. If you want to create ye catching photos like these, you might want to check out my other skill share course about floating product photography. But it is for intermediate photographers just because it requires the knowledge of photoshop. Now it's your turn. Style your first product photo, using the tips I shared in this class, and I will see you in the next one. 7. How to Optimize iPhone Settings for Product Photography?: Have your first styling concept ready to shoot, Let's pull out our iPhone and make sure we've optimized the settings. I'm going to mention the most important things only and it's best if you follow along as I mentioned each setting. Head over to settings, camera, preserve settings. First, turn on the exposure adjustment. This is very handy. This gives you more control over the exposure. Over exposed picture means that there are no details in a very bright part of the picture. An Underexposed picture means there are no details in a very dark part of the photo. Want to find a happy medium and that's why we need to have more control. When you turn the setting on, you're going to take a photo with an adjusted exposure, and when you're going to take the next one, you'll not need to adjust it again. If this feature is turned off, IPhone is just going to automatically reset it every time, and it's not always going to do a great job with exposure. Next, let's go one step back to the camera settings and make sure we have use volume up for burst feature on. This is just very handy when you're shooting something in motion. If there is a water splash, if there is some beautiful movement in the picture, you want to have a bunch of shots, so you can just press the volume out button, and that will take a lot of photos to choose from otherwise, you'll just have to press your shutter like this. Another thing I recommend is to turn the grid on. This will allow you to see those intersection points where it's best to put your product. You can also make sure it's in the center and you don't awkwardly position it a little bit to the left a little bit to the right because that just doesn't look very good. It whether has to be in the middle or in one of those intersections. W Let's go to the camera app itself. On a left top corner, we have flashlight. It's best to keep it off at all times. You don't want to shoot with a flashlight. Next to the flashlight, we have our exposure adjustment. If you tap on it, it opens up a little scale at the bottom, and you can control the exposure from there. It's quite trendy to shoot under exposed pictures, so you can set it to minus one, and your picture is going to be a bit darker, and the setting is going to be preserved now. For the next photos you take. In the right hand side in the corner, we have HDR. I prefer to keep that one off because I don't like the look of it. I think it makes photos look cheap. Next is my favorite live photo feature. I always have that one on. Again, it's very handy when I want to shoot something with the motion, when I want to capture a water splash because I'm going to have a few options to choose from, even though I just pressed my shutter once. In the top middle, I have the arrow up button. If I press that, it opens up a few features at the bottom. Go to the format. I'm usually shooting at four by three because this is the closest one to the Instagram post format that is four by five. And 16 by nine is the Instagram story. If I'm shooting something specifically for Instagram story, I'm going to shoot it at 16 by nine because I don't want to cut out anything. It's just looking a little bit weird sometimes when I took a photo for a post then cut it and the product is just a little bit squeezed in there. It's just not a great look. The next feature of the format is exposure, but we have a way to access that at the top. I just always tells you what kind of exposure setting you have right now. So keep that in mind if your picture is too bright or too dark, check if you've adjusted the exposure before. Another one is timer, 3 seconds, 10 seconds, very handy to use when you can put your phone on a tripod and then do something with your hands for the picture. Make that warner splash, for example. The last thing I'm going to touch on here is the portrait mode of the iPhone and blurs out the background, but it doesn't do a very good job, so I don't recommend using that. If you use it, it's going to be very apparent that it was blurred not by the camera, but by the technology, and it's not the best look. 8. How to Take Photos with an iPhone?: Now what's left to do is to finally take those product photos. I recommend you to think before you press the shutter button because there is nothing more annoying than choosing one out of 500 very similar photos. They take up a lot of space and you start procrastinating on selecting and editing them. And this whole creative process becomes not so exciting and quite daunting actually. But even before taking your first photo, there is something that you absolutely have to do, and that is to clean your iphone camera lens. There are always some pieces of dust or fingerprints on it, and if you don't clean it, the picture quality is going to be really, really low. So I recommend using an alcohol wipe for glasses or a special fabric piece that comes with every glasses that you purchase. I recommend taking just a few picks from different angles to find the best spot. And when you found it, take a couple of shots just to make sure you've got it. First, find the angle and then take a shot. Changing the angle can also help you to remove the glare from the product label. If that happens, glare typically screams cheap. Finally, you can zoom in a little bit on your shot to remove the lens distortion. This is a bit advanced, but it makes the product look so much better. Just believe me, you can zoom into 1.5 max, otherwise the quality will get poor. My last step is to make your composition as perfect as you possibly can. Don't have the attitude of, I'm going to fix it later because that's annoying. Things like that just pile up. And then you end up sitting in front of your computer for 8 hours just fixing minor details for your project. You don't want to do that as much as possible. Has to be done in production, not in post production. And now it's your turn. I hope you have been following along and adjusting the settings on your iphone. It's time to start taking those photos. Once you're finished with the first styling concept, move on to the next two. And when you're done with those, come back for another class where we will select and edit the photos on your iphone. 9. How to edit photos on iPhone?: You took some great shots. But most importantly, I hope you had a good time doing that. Now it's time to select the three best photos. I recommend you to do it right away after shooting because your memory is still fresh. You still remember which ones were good. Go, like them right now and delete everything else. To edit the photos, I recommend using the Snapseed app. It's from Google. It's free. It's really easy to use. It has a lot of tools and they're very precise. The best way to learn this app is just to play with each tool and see what it does. I'm going to show you just a few of them. Let's go to the tools tune image. If I scroll the screen up and down, this menu shows up, and I can choose what I want to tune. Let's go with brightness. All I need to do is to move my finger from left to right to adjust the setting. Adjusting the white balance can be very handy, too. You can make the picture cooler, or warmer, more green, or purple, depending on the style you're going for. The last two lell show you is healing. It can help to remove some imperfections on the photo. Just tap on it, and it's gone. Now let's edit this photo Snap side, and I'll show you a few more tools. Let's go to the looks at the left bottom corner. It opens up a bunch of different filters that I can use the most useful of which is the last edits. It applies every single thing that I've done for the picture before. It comes very handy for batch editing. But for this picture, let's go to the tools and details. There are two parameters that I can change structure and sharpening. Structure allows me to drastically increase or decrease the amount of details in the photo. For this picture, I prefer to decrease it a little bit just to remove this texture of the paper background. And to increase the amount of details, I'm going to use sharpening and not structure. And I prefer to keep sharpening to about 20. Otherwise, the picture is going to look very cheap. If I increase it to 100, it just doesn't look very good. Make sure to keep it around 20 as well. Next, let's explore the curves tool. It also has a bunch of different presets to use like soft contrast and hard contrast and brighten and darken. Depending on the aesthetics you're going for, you might want to use some of these. Adjusting this curve is just going to give you a little bit more control over each parameter. Now let's work on this photo, and let me show you the perspective tool. While I took this photo intentionally from a lower angle, and I do like how the shampoo bar is a little bit distorted. You may not want it for every single picture that you take, and this tool allows you to straighten everything up. Just play with these points and use this grid for your reference to make sure everything is aligned nicely. This is the before, and this is after. And finally, let's work on this picture a little bit. I'm going to go to the tools. Crop. I choose five by four, which is four by five. This is the Instaga format for posts. I'm going to crop this picture nicely. Then I'm going to go to the tools healing, and I'm going to firstly remove these corners just by tapping on these areas of the photo. There is also a little indent on this metal tin and I can easily remove that by tapping on this part of the image. Another thing I want to show you is the selective tool. The three tins that are laying flat on the mirror are darker, and I do want to brighten them up to bring more attention them. With this selective tool, I can selectively adjust different parts of the image. I tap in the middle of my round ten. Using my two fingers, I can scale the area of impact. Then I'm going to scroll on my screen up and down to open up the menu that has brightness contrast, saturation and structure. I'm going to go for brightness, and then I'm going to move my finger from the right to the left and see how much I want to change this part of the image. As you can see, this is very precise, and it's doing a great job. I can continue adjusting my selection Here it is. Look how much better the photo looks. I still have two more tins to adjust. So let me quickly do that. There it is, here is the Before and here is the after, Much, much better. In the resources section of the scores, I'm going to leave a PDF guide for you with more apps that you can use for editing your images. Now it's your turn. Start editing your photos and snaps it. Check out every single tool, play with it, and see what it does for your photo. Have a look at the PDF guide, download some more apps and test them out. This is time for you to to discover and to learn on your own. 10. Conclusion: Final step of the project and the final step of the course is to upload your three product photos to the project gallery. You've done a great job. You've made it to the end of the course. I'm proud of you. You are amazing. Use this course and this project as the beginning of your creative career. After you receive some constructive feedback from me, you can start creating your portfolio project. A portfolio project is typically 7-12 product photos in a similar style with a concept. You can upload it in the form of the Cars on your Instagram page. You can make a professional one for a photography and content creation, or you can add it to your portfolio website if you're aiming to become a pro supervisor. Check out my website dancing nova.com for Inspiration, and also check out my YouTube videos. I have a bunch of videos about product photography where I take you behind the scenes of my creative project, and also I share my island lifestyle. Of course, the most important thing, leave a review for this course. This is going to help me to make better courses in the future, let me know what you like, let me know what you think I can improve and let me know. What else would you like to learn? If you have any specific questions, you can dam me on Instagram at Stance dot Nova and check out some of my other skill share courses and follow my page because there are more courses to come. I'll see my next one. Please.