How High Quality Product Photography Can Strengthen Your Sunglass Brand

A hero shot showing off these sunglasses, perfect for use on social media to engage your potential customers

Brand Strength Brings in and Keeps Customers

Reading through this article from The Hartford Business Owners Playbook, you can begin to see the value that brand strength can have for your company. Building brand equity opens the door to customer loyalty and helps educate your customers on the value your brand has over other companies out there. One thing to note as you begin to build your own playbook is how much of this can be achieved by quality content. 

Your Product Photography is Part of Your Brand

I have said it in other articles, and it’s worth saying again here. Product Photography is a part of your brand. It’s as much a part of your brand as your name, logo, advertising content, marketing content, and web design. In order to build brand equity, your customers need to experience consistency when it comes to your content, including product photos. Does it make sense to have compelling Instagram images that links back to low-quality product photography back on your website? By the time they click through to a product page, you have almost earned a customer, that’s the time to keep up the experience and show off your products in the best possible way. Continue reading below for some thoughts on why you may want to outsource product photography for your brand.

Sunglasses are Tricky to Photograph Well

They can deceptively complex to photograph. They might seem like they would be simple to shoot since they don’t require the styling finesse of soft goods and apparel or have the complex metal surfaces that need to be managed in jewelry photography. The challenge with sunglasses mostly lies in the lenses. Lenses are generally quite reflective, even when they may not look like it in person. Simple dark tinted lenses can reflect a lot back to the camera, and that issue is multiplied when you start working with mirrored lenses. On top of that, you also have to deal with being able to see things behind the lens. It’s sort of the worst-case scenario of having a reflective AND translucent surface, it leaves few options for managing reflections. 

Most Sunglasses Will Require Post Processing

Post-processing, or retouching, is necessary for sunglass photography most of the time. The main thing to look out for is lens color. Does the color of the lenses in the image match how they look in person? It is very common to lose some of the saturation or color nuance when photographing sunglasses, and post-processing can bring those details back. You want your customers to have as accurate of color as possible when shopping on your site. Additional, as with many small accessories, dust will be an issue. You can use an air compressor or canned air, but dust still finds it’s way onto set, and those tiny dust particles often catch the light and become very distracting. Whether you are shooting the sunglasses yourself, or hiring a photographer, I do not recommend trying to save money on retouching, it’s part of investing in the best possible product photos. 

Investing In Showing Off Your Product

Speaking of investing in product photos: As I’ve written in other articles, consider approaching product photography with an investment mindset. If you are solely an eCommerce website, your product photos are all you have and you can fairly easily track the ROI of product photography because it has such a direct impact on sales. Clients sometimes come to me almost begrudging that they need product photos, or express that they have no or little budget to get them done. I will pose this question: What good is all the investment in production, website development, or marketing if your customers can’t see your product?

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Do you need more help with your product photography or strategy?

I’m always adding articles that I hope will help you understand how to think about and implement product photography for your eCommerce business. You can read them here:

If you are interested in my services as a product photographer or consultant, contact me here:



Your Jewelry Brand Needs Top Quality Product Photography

Selling Jewelry Online is all About Branding

Building a jewelry company that primarily sells online can be a challenge. It’s a competitive space to begin with and customers are generally looking for the best value for their money. A lot of times converting a new visitor boils down to earning your customers trust in the small amount of time you have them on your site. This is where a strong, cohesive brand can become your best tool to convert customers on your site, and you need to be thinking about product photography as an extension of your brand.

Your Product Photography is Part of Your Brand

You have a product that you’re proud of, a company name and logo that you love, a website that you invested in, and a marketing campaign that is bringing in traffic. What are your potential customers seeing once they are shopping on your site? Your customers have noticed everything you’ve invested so far, we know this because they made it to a product detail page (or PDP). Once there, are they seeing images that look like the left or the right? These specific images may not be on brand for you, but do highlight the differences in quality.

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Laid down and shot quickly with an iPhone and basic lighting set up. Piece looks dark, stones have no detail, color is incorrect, and image is low resolution.

Styled and shot with a camera and lens that is well suited for jewelry, custom lit, focus stacked, and lightly retouched to clean up dust.

Jewelry is Hard to Photograph Well

A jewelry piece is often constructed of metal and precious or semi-precious stones, and those two components photograph very differently. Often times, to show off both metal and stone in a way that is true to life, you may need to composite multiple images together. In order to shoot the metal in a way that controls reflections, the stone can look washed out, losing detail, however when you achieve good color and detail in the stone, the metal often has distracting reflections and highlights that are lost. An experienced jewelry photographer not only knows how best to approach these two parts of shooting a piece of jewelry, they know how to build a set and process that will allow them do that consistently across multiple pieces and types of jewelry.

Post Production for Jewelry is Specialized

Retouching is a standard part of the process in quality product photography for jewelry. One significant reason for this is that metal colors often appear different in person than when they are photographed. There are a lot of things that can impact this, but in order for all of your gold, silver and rose gold pieces to match each other, you need to be adjusting color as part of the post production process. Another thing to consider is everything that shows up when you zoom in very close to the product for photography. No matter how hard you try, there will be dust and tiny hairs that you can barely see with the naked eye. Cleaning up dust off the metal and shooting surface should be a standard part of your jewelry retouching package.

Invest in Showing Off Your Hard Work

You’ve worked hard to design and develop your jewelry line and now we need to get potential customers to see what makes your collection stand apart. Hiring the right person to photograph your jewelry and highlight all that qualities that make it unique can make all the difference in not only your conversion rates, but in how your brand is perceived. If you are interested in discussing your collection with me, and potentially sending me a few pieces to do a test shoot, please click here to reach out.

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Do you need more help with your product photography or strategy?

I am always adding articles that I hope will help you understand how to think about and implement product photography for your eCommerce business. You can read them here:

If you are interested in my services as a product photographer or consultant, contact me here:

How Many Product Images Do I Need?

So how many images do I need for each product?

It’s a question that comes up almost every time I work with a new e-commerce client: How many images do I need for each product?

There isn’t always a definitive answer to this. There are a few considerations to take into account when determining the right number of product photos to post on your shop product detail page (aka PDP).

What does the product tell you?

First and foremost, what do you want your customer to know about the product? If you are an internet only retailer, your online store is the only place where you customer can get information about your products, so what do you think they should know about it?

In general, a good place to start is 3 images: Front of the product, back of the product, and a detail shot. This is pretty typical for things like apparel, whether shot on a model or off-figure, and works well for most products in other categories.

Maybe your product is a purse or backpack, in which case you will still probably want a front, back, and detail shot, but maybe you want to add an interior shot so your customer can understand what the inside of the bag looks like.

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer, and try to imagine what you would want to see in order to make a decision to buy.

What does your Product Detail Page look like?

This is one thing that is often overlooked, but how are your product detail pages laid out? Does it look better with 4 images instead of 3? Are there parts of the page other than the main images where you can include additional detail images? Think about an Amazon listing, some listing pages have the standard image navigation, but as you scroll down the page, there are often additional detail images throughout the product information. Depending on how your PDP looks, it may look incomplete if you have too few product images, or overcrowded if you have too many.

Another thing to consider here: Does you PDP have flexibility in image count? If you sell not only apparel, but jewelry, sunglasses, handbags and other accessories, a standard image count may not work for all of those product categories. Some websites and platforms are structured in a way that allows flexibility in the number of product images you show, without sacrificing consistency.

Consider Mobile Users

Similar to the last section, you should consider how your product detail page looks on a mobile device. Product photos on your desktop site may be display in a carousel format that users can click through, but on mobile they may appear in a block of images that you must scroll through before any call to action (such as a Buy Now) button is visible. If they must scroll through 15 product images, that may discourage potential customers from buying if they don’t clearly see a way to purchase.

Are there platform requirements?

Maybe you have your own custom built e-Commerce site, or your using Shopify, Etsy, or selling on Amazon. Each of those may have their own requirements for product photography, not only number of images, but color space, resolution, and file size. This is also true if you are a brand supplying imagery to a retailer, check with the retailer if they have a required number of product images in order to sell on their site or platform.

Here are some resources for platform image requirements:
Amazon Product Image Requirements - Amazon
Additional Amazon Product Imagery Ideas - Business 2 Community
Shopify Image Requirements - Shopify

Who is your target demo?

Sometimes it’s worth checking out any information you can on regional differences in product photography expectations. Some regions may want as many as 15 photos of a single product, whereas other areas may only look through the first 3 or 4. As online purchasing grows and our e-Commerce businesses become more and more global, you may need to seek out information on what different global markets expect when it comes to product photos.

What are others in your space doing?

While I don’t always recommend comparing yourself to others when talking about content, creative, or product photography, is certainly can be useful to identify trends in product photography in your space, especially when trying to determine something practical like number of images to show.

Consider A/B testing

Most sites and retail platforms have a built in way to A/B test. For larger brands you can expand this to email campaigns, PPC campaigns, etc. I am not an expert in A/B testing, but in its simplest form, you have one version of the PDP with 3 product photos, and one version of the PDP with 8 product photos. Using a tool like Google Analytics, you can track conversions unique to each PDP, and use that to determine if the cost to product more product images is worth the return in conversion.

Here are some additional resources on A/B testing:
What is A/B testing - Big Commerce
The Complete Guide to A/B Testing - Shopify
Amazon A/B Testing Tips - PPC Entourage

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Do you need more help with your product photography or strategy?

I am always adding articles that I hope will help you understand how to think about and implement product photography for your eCommerce business. You can read them here:

If you are interested in my services as a product photographer or consultant, contact me here: