The challenge of a hero Shot

Hello Dear reader!

In product photography, is very common to see catalog images as nowadays on line shopping is extremely popular worldwide, however there are other types of photographs for products and are quite challenging for photographers and care called “hero shots”, and what does this mean? The first time I heard the term I did not quite understood it, so let me explain some more.

Well a hero shot is the image where you display a certain subject, maximizing all their qualities, such as colour, texture, design, properties, within a context that maximized all the attention in the product, but at the same time complements it and projects and idea to the audience/customers.

Generally a hero shot is the image that you see in the marketing campaigns, could be on a billboard, the web page of a designer, and even in the store apparels, it catches your eye and engages you to want to buy a certain item.

The photographer have to prepare before hand, and prior to the photoshoot gather the props that will be used, be creative and come up with a theme, and based on that if is necessary should also consider the creative choices that involve backgrounds, lenses to use, etcetera.

Then when the photoshoot is taking place, this is something that takes a lot more of time, as there is fine tuning to be done in the lighting set up, cleaning dust, and composing all the elements and angle of the camera, until everything is perfect. That is why this type of images are so much more time consuming, plus the the post processing time that involves retouching, cropping and in some cases even composing.

For this J’adore perfume of Dior, the time it took me to produce this two images, was 4 hours in the studio, plus around 4 more hours in post processing, but I really think was worth it, once you see the final results, is rewarding, and precisely the reason why I am a photographer, so you can reach with 1 image so much people.

I will be sharing with you next week the Fashion photoshoot I did at Yaletown in Vancouver, with multiple models and all the challenges I had to overcome.

See you soon!

Greta