We pride ourselves on using stunning images of our industrial IronFire furniture for our website and social media – we want to inspire people with our furniture and provide ideas that are not only aspirational but also achievable.
We quite often get asked how we come up with the images, so here are a few pointers that we always tend to be driven by whether taking images for our Facebook and Instagram; our product pages on our website, or our Houzz and Pinterest accounts.
- Talk
Quite often our ideas are bandied about our office as jokes or from things that our staff have seen and noticed from their weekends or even on the drive to work! These start off as “Have you seen…?” or “This would look so cool…” and from there develop into an idea for a shoot. They are not always conventional (putting a coffee table into a tree anyone?) but sometimes from these random conversations, great shoots are produced!
- Plan
From these ideas, we plan out the shoot using a moodboard. This will include props that we need, and our aims and targets from the shoot. We make sure that the product in question is always the focus – be it our planter or console table.
- Crib Sheet
We have a pre-planned standard photo shoot crib sheet that we take to every shoot with us. It details house angles, house shots and things we need to remember to take with us. We’ve been caught out before coming back from a shoot and saying “We forgot to take X shot” so this makes sure that we come back with everything that we want.
- Photographer
We have our own in-house photographer. This is really handy for us, as it means that we can be spontaneous with our shoots (rare sunny day? Camera out!) and that he is fully aware of the IronFire product branding and what we need to achieve from each shoot.
- Be flexible
You may have an idea in your head that sounds great in theory, but on the camera screen isn’t really working. If that’s the case, why not turn it into something else? Change the angles, change the props, use the shoot to take advantage of close ups or the product. Our Shou sugi-ban table tops are stunning, and often the focus of a shoot as well as the main piece of IronFire furniture.
- There’s no I in team
The photoshoot may be your baby, but sometimes others in your team can look at what you’re doing with fresh eyes and come up with a new angle or way to take a shot. You really have nothing to lose by taking this on-board, and our attitude is that it’s better to come back to the studio with more shots of the industrial iron table or chairs than you need instead of not enough and wishing that you’d taken more!
7. We believe in supporting local businesses (see our other blog posts for examples of these) so find that they are more than happy to let us use their locations to shoot our products in return for mentions on our website and social media accounts. This is a great way of networking and providing leads back for others as well as getting great shots in environments that you may not easily have access to!
- Edit
We have people well skilled in Photoshop which enables us to adjust our images to the size and finish that we want. We also make sure that fonts are the same when putting text onto images and resize them all for social media platforms. We like consistency: this is important for our IronFire branding.
- Learn from Each Shoot
We value feedback, and analyse each shoot to see what works for us and what doesn’t. The whole team is involved in this (and we have very different ideas on what we like and what we don’t like!) but it’s great to get differing perspectives on our results – and learn and grow from them.
- Results
And then all there is left to do is pat each other on the backs when you’ve achieved great images that started off as an idea in someone’s head! Make sure you’re proud of them. We know we are.
