As, amongst other things, a product photographer in Horsham, West Sussex I get to visit many different companies selling hundreds of different products, anything from a small piece of wiring through to a ten or twelve person dining table. I personally find it fascinating photographing products and I’ve been to companies in Rudgwick, Rusper, Southwater, Horsham, Billingshurst, Crawley, Gatwick, Guildford and Redhill as a commercial photographer, either photographing products or creating virtual tours of a hotel that they can use on their web site.
To the layman it probably doesn’t seem like an interesting job. But with every building, product and company wanting to sell themselves, or their products and stand out from the crowd of competitors requires a skilled photographer with a trained eye to capture their product of choice.
My most recent product photo shoot was for a small Horsham company selling leak detection units, exciting I know, but then where would we be without them? Imagine what would happen if there was a major leak at the Amazon Online retailer’s warehouse…how many millions and millions of pounds worth of damage to countless of their products could be caused very quickly. So as you can imagine, there’s a market for that sort of product. And every good product needs a photo to go with it.
Another recent bit of work has been for an outdoor furniture company based in Rudgwick, which is along the road from Guildford to Horsham. There was a specific requirement with these products to photograph them both in a real life garden setting as well as getting some clean detailed product photographs of each individual item to communicate both the quality and the beauty of the product to the company’s customers.
Finally I was asked to photograph a new range of clothing for a London based designer brand, with a special request which required editing some of the clothing to have a variety of different colours as the products would be customisable by the clients and they wanted to have a selection of colour ideas available for the customers to get the idea of what they could get from the manufacturer.
And finally, although not a designer brand, another Horsham and Bristol based company asked me to photograph a collection of products that they would be selling both online and on location at the recent World Snooker Championships, with some of the clothing items I was photographing actually being worn by the stars themselves during the competition.
Hence why I enjoy product and commercial photography so much. It’s the sheer variety, shooting everything from a multi storey hotel and all the various rooms they have on offer, through to a Cat 5 connector cable, the result for all the customers I’ve worked for is increased sales and revenue…which to me means a happy customer and another job well done.
So although I love photographing weddings as well studio and family portraiture, I will still enjoy my work in product photography when it comes in for the simple reason that I’m just so interested in what companies, and individuals, across Sussex, Surrey and London produce and have to offer. And I relish the challenge of photographing things I, nor many other people, don’t get to see very often, if at all and making them look fantastic/beautiful and desirable so much so, that they can be sell-able. All in all, it’s a demanding yet very interesting job that I relish.