The first thing you notice about commercial advertising photography is the product and how fantastic it looks. Successful and effective advertising photographers will be able to create an image that stands out for all the right reasons, grabs the attention of the target audience, and communicates the right message almost instantly.
But while it’s easy to admire the look of the product and the skill of the photographer, in most cases, commercial advertising photography isn’t about what you see, it’s about what you don’t see. You may think that when you look at an advertising image, what he’s seeing is what the photographer saw, but that’s not always the case.
Of course, we all know there are tricks in the trade and many people will immediately assume that any image will have been manipulated with a graphics tool like Adobe’s Photoshop, and while this may be the case, there is much more at stake than meets the eye. the eye. One of the first things to appreciate in business advertising is that what you see is not exactly what you would see if you were looking at the product yourself in a store.
Lighting, environment, and many little-known tricks of the trade come into play, helping to create an illusion that not only looks real, but in some cases looks more real than it would in real life. For example, if you were looking at a TV in a store, you’d probably see a lot of distracting reflections on the screen, or the TV would be on and you’d be seeing an image. However, in a product image, you will see a screen that has no distracting reflections, or it will appear to be on and display an image.
The problem is that if you take a picture of a TV, whether it’s turned on or off, neither result will look very realistic. So how do product photographers make their images look so realistic, while still being completely different than what a normal TV photo would look like?
To take a picture of a turned off TV, commercial advertising photographers will either have a studio that includes a 360-degree background to remove any distracting reflections, or they’ll edit the image afterwards, replacing the screen with a black shaded rectangle. that looks realistic, but doesn’t even exist as part of the screen in real life. But how about taking a picture of a TV that’s turned on?
If you’ve ever tried this, you’ll know that the result will look terrible, very blurry and kind of lost. This is because the camera lens sees what your eyes and brain cannot: the fact that the image on the screen is just an illusion created by rapidly blinking lights. Therefore, professional photographers usually take a screenshot of a computer and then superimpose it on the screen photo to improve the quality. The final image will look as expected, even though you know it wouldn’t really look like that if you took a picture of it.
Effective commercial advertising photography allows us to be fooled, even when we know that what we are looking at cannot be real, despite appearing very real. The art of illusion and tricking the eye is subtle, because consumers won’t be interested in an image that has been obviously manipulated, but will be drawn to an image that they know can’t be completely real. If you’re not sure how to strike the right balance, it’s much safer to leave it to the experts.
