Supplement Close-Ups

In order to increase focus on the unique aspects of the brand, the Seeking Health marketing department pushed for a full website redesign.  With the change came an assessment of many of the primary aspects of the site, including product imagery.  

The company had previously contracted with an external photography studio for product bottle images and close-up imagery of the actual supplements.  As the product line is always growing and changing, this lead to inconsistent product representation, high costs, and slow turnaround for new or revised products.  Bottle imagery was solved by switching to digital renders but close-up shots were up in the air.  

I made a pitch to bring the process in house where we could improve consistency, cost, and turnaround while also taking advantage of the opportunity to better reflect the brand in another aspect of the new website. 

The lead designer and I met to discuss our goals for the new style and brainstorm.  We decided that it was important to create a style that stood out from the generic industry standard so that people would quickly recognize the brand in the sea of often low-quality competition.  We also wanted to find a way to visually feature the transparency the brand focuses on when it comes to ingredients and quality.  And finally, it was important to create a consistent style that successfully portrayed the various supplement delivery types. 

I set out to test a few of the ideas that came up.  The initially prevailing concept prioritized ease and speed which kept costs down and allowed images to be taken with fewer specialized tools.  It involved shooting each product in a standard-sized glass container with a two light setup.  The first light was soft to bring out important detail and provide ambient exposure and second was hard to cast a unique shadow and provide a nice highlight detail. 

Although it met our initial goals, some of the potential problems of this format became more clear as I shot through a variety of items.  The seemingly random quantity of a product could confuse the customer as to the recommended serving size and supplements with less texture or detail, like liquids and some powders, may not actually provide much usable information. As a contrast, I decided to shoot an additional format that focused on more detail but also required more time and skill to include with my final findings. 

After presenting the results of the tests to the marketing team there was unanimous consensus in the more detailed but complicated format and I quickly got approval to move forward photographing the entire product catalog of over 120 supplements.  My favorite products to shoot were the most complicated, the liquids and droppers.  It took burst firing the shutter while dumping and dropping the liquids multiple times in order to get a solid combination of images to eventually composite together into the final dynamic images.