Footwear Photography

We find that photographing shoes for our clients is a lot of fun. We like to keep the natural shadows in to ground them, though this really does depend on our clients. We use great lighting to really show the quality of the footwear. We also control our depth of field to ensure the entire shoe is in focus from front to back.

Think about how your customers are going to react if they see bad imagery on your ecommerce store. What is your best approach to produce great footwear product photography to drive your ecommerce store sales?

You will need a high quality camera, table, background paper, stuffing, fishing wire and tripod. We use a manfrotto still life table for our footwear photography as it has a very useful infinity curve, giving us a nice clean background to remove in retouching. You could, though, use paper for this - attach the paper to a wall and let it drop down onto a table and pull it out a little horizontally so you get the nice infinity curve too.

Plan ahead. Though fun, footwear can be time consuming to photograph. Prepare the footwear, ensure they are clean, laces or straps are neat and tidy, padded well without showing the stuffing. Try to photograph unworn items - you do not want to be retouching dirt as you wore them for a photoshoot.

Next you need to think about the shots you want. Footwear looks great on a page when all positioned the same way, for example when shooting footwear for Amazon, the main image has a requirement to be one shoe, facing to the left at 45 degrees. This ensures that for Amazon, no matter the seller, when shoes are listed on their search results, they all look uniform. Once you have thought about your main image, think about what images you need to complement your hero shot. What will your customers want to see to make them want to click add to basket? We recommend at least 2 more shots, though 3-4 is more useful as they provide more information to the customer.

If you really want to show off your footwear, you might think about adding a 360 product spin to your e-com site.

360 spins have been shown to not only increase sales, but also they help reduce returns as your customers get to see everything before they buy!

When photographing footwear with straps, using fishing wire to suspend the straps so they look like they are being worn. As the fishing wire is so thin, it is easy to remove from your footwear images with some light retouching later.

Although there is no one style you need to adhere to when photographing flat lay product photos, there are some standards that make your photography stand out from the competition and will help you to present a complete and cohesive collection of garments on your eCommerce site.

It is very important to retouch your products well. If the first image of your product your customers look at is bad, it is likely to be the last image they look at.
Remove the background
Crop to a uniform size
Keep or remove natural shadow
Remove blemishes
Remove fishing wire

Choose an image resolution high enough to show the quality of your products, but not so high that it slows down your eCommerce store. Aim for between 1000 - 2000 pixels on the one edge.