When pre-planning marketing images, we can easily get caught focusing only on product glamour shots for Product Specials. Especially when it comes to the high-volume of creative specials in the food and drink industry. While those are obviously an essential part of your business big or small, customers love to feel like they are a part of the behind-the-scenes story of how their favorite food or drinks get made.

Draw your customers taste buds in further and find more ways to talk about popular specials by shooting things being made. With a little creativity, you can easily do this without giving away any special recipes, techniques or focusing on other brands and products used to make yours. Not only does this draw the attention of your customers taste buds, but it also builds upon many other elements of subliminal business brand imaging that keeps your customer base loyal.

Showing Behind-the-Scenes photos build subliminal branding values such as:

  • Cleanliness of workspace.
  • Cleanliness of employees (hands and clothing).
  • A happy and fun work environment.

Some important things to pay attention to when shooting for great lifestyle product shots are:

  • Flat Lighting! Use side-light when possible such as some harsh window light. This will take some practice depending on how your location is set up and how skilled you or your photographer is.
  • Mind indoor YELLOW Lighting! Without going into too much detail, this is commonly referred to as the “white balance” which refers to how warm or cool in temperature your images end up with the lighting scenario you’re shooting in. I generally shoot my images in auto and make adjustments post-editing knocking down the yellows quite a bit. This can be referred to as “cast” or “temperature” if editing through a phone app. This is a major visual element that can make or break a delicious shot.
  • Show Action & Movement! Things being poured, sprinkled, cut, etc. Shows much more interest than a static item.
  • Depth of Field! Background items should be blurry showing depth and drawing the focus to the main item.
  • Clean up your background! Don’t just count on the background being blurry — messy areas will still show up like a sore thumb even when out of focus. Turn containers with labels, move things around and declutter the zone.
  • Be mindful of the hands in your shots! Most of these shots are close-up with hands fully or partially in the shots. I always insist any hands in my shots be well manicured (clean cuticles and nice nails).
  • Keep your message clear! Keep other brand labels out of the shots unless you are promoting that brand alongside yours.

At the end of the day, you are giving yourself a promising leg-up in providing your social medial coverage with even more opportunities to talk about the same product special without inundating your fans with the repeat visual promotion over and over.

This is one area you should utilize a photographer who knows what they are doing (re: working with any lighting condition) if you can, but it’s not always necessary. Offering mini iPhone Photography Training for employees that may have a knack for it and offering perks to these employees for getting great shots that can be utilized company-wide is also a smart way to go about collecting stock photos during business hours while specials are being made.

I have offered private iPhone Photography training courses to business teams in the past, while I don’t have any current service pages on my website at this point, if you’re looking for this type of training for your teams, it is available upon request.

Featured Client: The Human Bean