Mobile Photography Weekly

- Hey everybody, welcome back to Mobile Photography Weekly. I'm Sean Duggan and I'm at the Make Local Habit store in Nevada City, California. And this week's episode is a continuation of something we started last week, and the scenario there was that you are tasked with creating photographs for a small business profile, or a blog article, or something like that. Last week, we talked about meeting with the business owner, talking over the shoot, and getting some information about their business and the shop. This week, I want to go over the photographs that I've taken and just sort of take you through the thought process that I used. So one approach you can do if you've never done this sort of thing before is kind of take a page from the movie-making playbook, which is to start with an establishing shot, where you show the whole business, maybe the front of the store. Move in for medium shots, and then finally close-ups, both of the products and maybe portraits of the business owner. So in my case, I kind of did it in the opposite way. I started inside the store here and ended up with the establishing shots, but let me just take you through some of the pictures that I made and we'll talk about them. So I started focusing on some of the products in the store. This is a store that features crafts and artwork by local artisans and crafts people. And I tried to find nice angles that showed the products well, but also looked good photographically. So on this one here, I like the label there and then I saw that there was a product called Mermaid Tears and that really resonated with me. I love this diagonal angle there. And feel free to move things around if you need to, if you're going to get a better shot by adjusting something and moving it around. For instance, on these nesting dolls I adjusted those and moved them around. And on these bottles, I rotated the bottles a little bit so we could see the label little bit better. Same thing with this product here. Getting close, but you can also show the larger product displays as well. And again, talk to the business owner and if they have any specific needs, or maybe there's products they're featuring that month and a sale, if you can do some extra photographs, it'll help them out, that's always a good thing to know. Now most of the shots that I was making, I was shooting horizontally 'cause I was envisioning this for a blog article, and of course in a project like that, horizontal tends to work better if it's being viewed on a computer screen, and sometimes on a mobile device. I did do some verticals, but when I shot verticals I was also thinking that they could be maybe cropped to a square for, for instance an Instagram feed, something like that. So both of those vertical and horizontal, could be easily cropped to a square if needed. And again, here's one where I moved some of the products around just to get a better arrangement, little bit more pleasing, little bit more depth in the scene with these little toys. And again here, even though this is a horizontal, I'm thinking it could be cropped to a square, especially this one right here, could be easily cropped to a square. And just the bold, colorful graphic shapes work really well there. And then I did my establishing shot, sort of like the wide view of the store. This worked pretty good here, but then I put on a Moment 18 millimeter lens onto my phone, and that gave me an even wider view there, so you can see the difference there between the normal iPhone lens, and then with the Moment 18 millimeter. And then of course, another part of doing a small business profile is doing a portrait of the business owner. So towards the end here, I took a few portraits of Kiya here in the shop, and that worked out really well. The light was really pleasing at that time of the day. And then, we went outside and she just sort of naturally leaned against the front of the store while I was getting set up, and I said, "Oh, stop, that looks great." And so, we took some shots of her in front of the store. We could see the sign. And those worked out really well too. (shutter clicking) And then, in terms of just the front of the store and the sign, one thing I really liked was this gas street lantern here. That's kind of a hallmark of Nevada City and the fact that the lantern is on and we can see it, that really worked well. So when you're working on this sort of a project, again, think about that conceptual structure of the establishing shot, the medium shot, and the closeup to portray both the business and the objects in the store, as well as a portrait of the business owner.