How to take nice photos at home

Whether for your website, social media, or communication materials, it is essential to learn how to take beautiful photos of yourself, your products, or your workspace. True ambassadors of your business, photos are indispensable as they set you apart from the competition and encourage your prospects to become clients. Photos can convey emotion, highlight people or objects, inspire dreams, or create desires… as long as they are successful!

And today, it is not necessarily required to own a professional camera to capture beautiful images: with a little trick, photos taken with smartphones can be of great quality.

In this article, we present our tips for taking beautiful photos from home, all with the help of your phone, a bit of patience, and creativity!

1. Your Device

A professional camera will remain the most effective tool for capturing your images. However, your smartphone can easily steal the show! The most recent models now come equipped with impressive zoom and a complete, versatile camera module, making them very competitive. If your phone is from an older generation, don't panic; good lighting will be your best ally! Or feel free to rent one while you take your shots.

2. Lighting

Even if you are comfortable using the flash, always prefer natural light. The most successful product photos are often taken near a window, around noon or early afternoon, and in a bright room. If you cannot achieve the ideal lighting, it is easy to enhance it. For example, you can make a reflector to place near a window by attaching aluminum foil to cardboard.

If you want a more subdued and golden effect, wait for the golden hour! In photography, the golden hour is the short period following sunrise or preceding sunset. The lights are soft, shimmering, and the colors are more vibrant.

If you are not satisfied with the different results, you can also invest in a ring light that will allow you to reproduce the perfect lighting for your desired output!

3. The Setting

When photographing products, it is essential to take care of your setting. A beautiful background enhances your subjects/products, standardizes your content, and allows for a reminder of your identity (colors, patterns…). Keep in mind that the main objective is to highlight an object, so the background should neither be too busy nor dominate. You can create a mini photo studio at home using sheets and embellish it with beautiful materials, plants, or repurposed decorative elements.

4. The Shots

When taking a photo, always ask yourself the same questions: What is my main subject? Who/What should I highlight through my shot? What story do I want to tell?

Use colors, lines, shapes, and contrasts to draw attention to the main element of the photograph. You should then vary the shots to get the most glimpses and angles possible to reveal your subject in its entirety. You can take wide shots, close-ups, and focus shots. If possible, repeat the same types of shots and formats (portrait or landscape) across all photographed products to give coherence and harmony to your content.

5. Touch-ups

Once your photo session is completed, it can sometimes be interesting to focus on photo retouching. Many software options are accessible and easy to use, but one can quickly get lost among the quantity of filters and options. To maintain coherence between your contents, apply the same retouching to all your photos and crop them in the same way.

If you want them to be as close to reality as possible, modify classic parameters like brightness, saturation, shadows, and sharpness. If you prefer to obtain more original or vintage photos, apply filters like sepia or black and white. We recommend always making a copy of the original photo before modifying it so you can keep a raw copy that you can duplicate and re-edit later.

And there you go, you are now ready to take your most beautiful shots!