Fashion Flat Lay Photography

More and more businesses are opting for flat lay photography to showcase their products on online selling platforms, such as Amazon. The bird’s-eye view of clothing items, accessories, and other types of articles offers many possibilities when it comes to clearly displaying a product in any eCommerce. In today’s article, we’ll explain how to properly execute fashion flat lay photography and differentiate yourself from the competition.

How to do fashion flat lay photography?

Properly illuminate your product

Good lighting is everything when taking any photograph, even more so when you want to showcase a product through a website. Your photograph should show the product in detail, in its entirety, to generate sufficient trust in the potential customer. This can also help you when defining the shape and size of your product. In terms of lighting for fashion flat lay photography, your main “enemy” will be shadows. These can achieve the opposite effect to what’s desired and hide some areas of your garments or accessories. To avoid them, you should use diffused light sources with color temperatures as realistic as possible. Without a doubt, for this type of photography, the use of LED lighting with diffusion is recommended. If, on the contrary, you prefer to create more creative sets or still lifes for your product photographs, this type of photography will also be of great help as it allows you to see more than one product in the same image.

The right support

For fashion flat lay photography, you’ll need to use a table, preferably backlit, where you’ll lay out your products flat. Additionally, you’ll need a camera support that offers the possibility of giving it a bird’s-eye angle. For these types of sessions, a tripod could become cumbersome due to its limitation in terms of height and even position.

Take care of the aesthetics

The most obvious step of any session. If you want to sell your products online, before any session you should properly prepare them; iron them, clean them, gently stretch them, remove small imperfections such as threads or lint, and hide labels. This will also allow us to save time when creating our packshots.

Configure the camera

Depending on the support and lighting you have for your product photo session, you should configure your camera: a low ISO (100/200), shutter speed, and medium aperture values (between f/11 and f/18). Additionally, it’s essential to have a focal length greater than 35mm for these cases. Lastly, don’t forget to adjust the manual white balance with a gray card.

Edit your photos

If you’ve correctly followed the previous steps, your photograph will hardly need any editing in the post-production phase. However, if you wish to crop the backgrounds of your photographs, keep in mind that it will take time.

In this era of booming eCommerce businesses, there are specific tools to facilitate and save costs in product photography sessions. At AVisual STUDIOS, you’ll find photo studio rentals by the hour with fully prepared machines, integrated with automation software for photographs and packshots. In the case of flat lay or flat lay photography, the Alphatable consists of a backlit base, two LED panels on the sides, adjustable in position and intensity, and a motorized overhead support in suspension for your camera. The integrated automation software streamlines the production process and performs automatic background removal and photo retouching, so you can directly upload your photographs to your eCommerce page on the same day of the session.