Product photography is where items like drinks, toiletries, jewellery, cameras, etc are photographed for use in advertising and marketing to promote the company.
Prior to the explosion in the use of photography, artists would draw the product for use in the advertising material. Some of these, in particular the images used for the Pears soap advertisements are seen as classics. An example of one of these classic images, the ‘Charm of youth and the joy of age’ Pears soap advert from 1916 is shown below:
In fact some companies still prefer to use illustrations.
But when traditional, film based, photography became more widespread advertisers could use life like images showing the target products either in isolation or with suitable props (items used to create an atmosphere or a particular scenario).
The use of photographs also resulting in cost reductions for the advertising companies who no longer needed the services of an artist. But in turn, limited the advertisers to realistic images which had to be creatable within the studio or at the location.
The increasing use of digital photography where images can easily be manipulated, far cheaper than when traditional film based photography was used, and a photograph can be manipulated to almost look like an artists sketch or painting, more elaborate designs can be used.
But, with the increase in three dimensional computer generated imaging, promotional companies can explore even more options where photography is absent from the whole process. One example that I have seen is where a company had a car computer designed, with textures and lighting applied and then placed in front of a fractual generated landscape with a computer generated sky. At no stage during the production of the finished image were any cameras used, even the driver who was added at a later stage was a computer generated model. But this technology is still far too expensive for many companies to even consider using.
But, many people still prefer to so lifelike, or photographic, images of the products that they are interested in so, at least for the near future, product photography is still very important to the advertising and marketing industry.
Applications of Product and Advertising Photography
Early advertisements for products involved newspaper adverts, usually describing the product and its benefits, later drawings were added to the adverts. Later billboards were used to promote products or services, as you can see below these are still used today:
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Next came radio and television advertising, which although very powerful can be very expensive.
With the explosion of the internet, which was actually a former US military project called “ARPANET” designed to maintain contact between military computer networks in the event of a nuclear war, companies have now the most powerful advertising medium available.
With the internet advertisers are no longer limited to static images, but can now have animations and videos used to promote their goods, and it is here, on the internet, that both large and small companies can advertise side by side. In fact I have even seen some better designed and laid out websites from smaller companies who need to work harder to promote their goods than some larger companies who are more relying on their name and brand !
With the development of the internet and its various formats (Flash, Siverlight WML, and XML) they ways that advertisers can promote their goods and services is increasing.
Although there are some unusual ways of promotion:
Simple, effective, but illegal !
