Preparing products for a studio shoot

By James Jones, founder of Granary Digital · 5 November 2026

The fastest product days all look the same from the studio floor. The stock arrives unboxed, sorted into the order it will be shot, with a list that says what each item needs. The slowest ones start with a pallet of sealed cartons and a pair of scissors.

The week before: sort, list, spare

Unbox everything at your end. Packaging, tissue, cable ties and swing tags take longer to remove than you think, and doing it in the studio means paying studio rates to make a pile of cardboard. Repack the products loose, in crates or open boxes, in shot order.

Write a shot list per product. For each item, the angles you need and where each picture is going. A typical listing wants a front, a back, a three-quarter view and a detail, with an in-use shot for the product page or the ads. Put the product code at the start of each line so the list, the crates and the files all use the same name.

Bring spares. Two of everything that could be scuffed, dented or spilt, and three of anything that will be opened, poured or eaten. The perfect one is often the second one out of the box.

Send the list ahead. A shot list in the studio's inbox a few days early means the lighting can be planned around the products that are hardest to light, and the day can be ordered so similar items share a setup. If you are also briefing video or a model, the one-page brief covers the rest.

On the day: make each one camera-ready

Cameras see things eyes skip. Before an item goes on the table:

• Peel off price stickers and barcodes you don't want in shot. Residue shows under hard light, so test your remover on a spare first.
• Dust with a soft brush or a blower, and handle anything polished in cotton gloves. A fingerprint on a lid has to be retouched out of every frame it appears in.
• Turn labels square to camera and check the print is straight on the bottle. A label a few degrees off looks wrong and is tedious to fix afterwards.
• Steam fabric on the day, after the journey. Creases from a van ride show up at full resolution. There is a garment rail in the dressing room to hang things as they come out of the crates.
• Fill bottles and jars to the same level across the range. Customers compare them side by side on a listing, and so will you.

The things that fight the camera

Glass and anything shiny

A glass bottle on a white cove reflects the whole room. That is useful, because a white room gives clean white reflections, but it also means clear glass on white has no edges. The fix is black: flags either side of the bottle draw dark lines down the glass that describe its shape. Flags are part of the house grip, along with C-stands and bounce, so this costs time, not money. Allow for it in the schedule, because shiny products tend to need a setup each.

Liquids

Pours and splashes are fun and slow. Each attempt means cleaning the set, drying the product and refilling, so bring plenty of liquid and more spares than you think. If the drink is the product, bring it cold and bring a lot of it.

Colour

Screens disagree and phone photos lie. If a colour has to match exactly, bring a physical sample of the true colour: the fabric swatch, the painted panel, the product you consider correct. It can sit in frame for a reference shot and be matched against in the edit. If you are adding to an existing range, send the current listings and your brand guidelines and we will light to match, so the new images sit in the old grid without a visible seam.

Scale

A 30ml serum and a 500ml bottle look the same size on a white background. If size matters to the buyer, plan a scale shot: in a hand, next to something everybody knows, or grouped with the rest of the range.

Where the products go

Most product work at the barn happens on the White Space cove. Small items go on a tabletop set up on the cove floor, large ones sit straight on the white, and anything with wheels can be driven in through the 2.4m doors. The 1m turntable is there for 360 spins. Vans reverse straight up to the doors at ground level, with fifteen parking spaces, so crates come in at floor level and never up a staircase. Product photography studio hire has the rates, from £295+VAT for a half day, and cove or tabletop explains when a cove earns its cost.

You don't have to come. Plenty of brands courier the stock with the shot list and approve pictures from a live gallery, over fibre internet that runs at around 500 Mbps down and 100 up.

Name the files before you shoot them

Agree a file naming convention before the day and put it on the shot list. Product code, angle, version, in that order, lets the pictures drop straight into your store or your asset library without anyone renaming 400 files on a Friday afternoon. It is the least glamorous line on the list and the one people thank themselves for later.

If you would rather hand the whole thing over, our e-commerce content days plan the list SKU by SKU, shoot stills and video in one visit, and deliver it edited, from £2,950+VAT.

Send us the product list and a couple of reference images, and we will work out the order of the day with you.

More from the Journal

• How to brief a studio or a video crew
• How many videos can you film in a day?
• What to wear on camera for a video shoot
• All Journal articles

The picture at the top of this article is an illustration generated to show the set-up. It is not a photograph of a client or of a real job.