Floating photography is an awesome way to display your products in an eye catching way. The execution in which you are photographing your products is imporant, the outcome will ultimately determine how engaged your consumers will be. Instead of paying hundreds for a photographer, you can easily do your own photography from home!
With the perfect camera, lighting, and backdrop, your photos will definetly stick out to be the best. Not sure what to use? Our photography equipment can be found here.
Essentially what you need to figure out is how you're going to hang the product in front of the camera. It is important to create a shadow so that it is given a floating effect. The stronger the lighting, the stronger the casted shadow will appear in your photos!
Our product of choice that we decided to shoot was a hat, feel free to tweak each step to how it should cater to you.
To hang the hat we decided to use yarn which we proceeded to wrap around the button of the hat.
To give the hat a full look and maintain it's form, we stuffed the inside of it with packaging materials, feel free to use anything accessible to you!
When it came to the actual suspension of the hat, we used the stand to a boom mic. This is the time to get creative and use anything you have at home, even taping it to the ceiling should do the trick! If needed, feel free to attach additional strings to your product to stabalize it.
Snap away! Take your time and have patience, ultimately trust the process! Take as many photos as you need and with as many different products needed as well. Play with the set up a little and discover the full potential of floating photography.
Once you've gotten all the shots that you need, upload them onto the computer to prepare for photoshop. We started by doing some editing in lightroom to adjust any lighting to the photo, and then move them into the Adobe Creative Cloud for photoshop.
The first step we took for our photos is we started off with duplicating the layers. Next, with the clone stamp we were able to color over string we used to hang the hat. Using the patch tool, we made sure we smoothed over everything just in one swoop. We repeated this step with the shadow of the hat by adjusting any weird shadows that were made or even eliminating lint.
With the liquify tool we went all around the edges and reshaped the hat to give it better form. Be sure to follow the actual garment itself, still allowing it to look as natural as possible.
Finally, crop the photo to your liking and however it will suit your website or Instagram feed best.
Bonus Step
If you're looking to add more to your already awesome photo, text is a good option to opt for.
For our text we decided to add a circle around the perimiter of the hat and switched the fill to transparent. We then switched to the type on path tool and typed out "Doheny Boyz Cap" and pasted it all the way around. After you've typed on the path, hide or delete the ellipse tool that created the circle. To tuck some of the words behind the hat, be sure to use the masking tool and erase around the perimiter, ensuring no words overlap the product.
Your Photography game can really take your business to the next level! Photographers and studios can become costly, why not do it all from home? For a more indepth tutorial on how we shot and edited our photos, you can watch here.
We've also demonstrated other photography methods and advice for at home photography in a previous video which you can also watch here!
