In web development and creative projects, I always noticed that most business owners do not care much about the quality of the pictures they are providing. 

I have found that many startup owners struggle to make healthy and appealing product shots with excellent composition, lighting, and focus, attracting customers to view their products repeatedly.

Pictures are significant to let customers understand how your product looks from different angles, so it's crucial to take photos of your products clean & crisp with the right amount of lights. 

When taking the right pictures,  it’s essential to remember that product shots describe customers' persona and display the solution to customers' problems. Always remember a blurry low-quality image can scare customers away. 

I always prefer to take pictures by going to an outdoor display to play with different angles & shades of lights. It is very convenient for me to understand what shots I need and from what angles as I plan the entire web development and creative project strategy targeting the desired customer group, demography & business goals. 

Before doing a photo shoot or a video shoot, I take three-four days to research online and try to take a look at the competitor's catalog to create a strategy asking myself the following questions: 

• How can I produce better pictures than them? 
• What media do they use to enhance photographs? 
• What kind of text & description are they using (a catchy phrase) to describe the images?  
• What are they missing that I can improve? 
• How can I reflect on the customer's persona that resolves issues?

The most important is to understand the industry. The photoshoot depends on what industry you are targeting. When I work on a photoshoot project that targets the B2B customers, I usually focus on product usage, implementation, installation, highlighting the technical part of the product and product application. 

With the B2C industry, it's about the fun of loving the products and services. Also, another critical part is demography! 

I have found this is a debate when it's a question of a photoshoot:

Do you hire professional photographers or take pictures of your own to save money? 

It depends on the budget you have. If you are intelligent and creative and take pictures that send messages to the customers, it doesn't matter how you shoot the photos. 

Ideas are a big player here. Now in this online marketing world, everything happens very fast. So if you want very quickly to upload pictures to your Facebook or Instagram group, be creative, take down the different angle shots, add some great descriptions. 

To show professionalism and you have a specific budget, of course, working with a professional photographer would be the best choice. As a marketing manager looking to grip the store, I create a list of essential photoshoot ideas. So I can mix and match with aperture photography and professional photography. As mobile phone technology improves, you can capture great photos with your phone. However, as I mentioned before, it's not always the best decision; it all depends on the company and the budget. 

As a marketing director, it's imperative to save marketing budget, so I usually suggest recruiting fresh graduates or young students who are learning commercial photoshoots in a community college and engaging them as interns so, in this way, I help the young men & women to gain industry experience and also saving the company budget and getting great products. But one thing to remember, the marketing manager or director should have a clear idea of what they want. If the marketing manager is not creative and visionary, it's hard to work with fresh graduates. 

They need to know the purchasing decisions on visual information and teach the fresh graduates the concepts and market of the products. They need to train them that compelling visuals such as well-executed corporate photos can capture consumer attention, boost engagement, and drive professional communication and interest. In terms of branding the company, it’s essential to show, not tell.

That is why I completed a course in commercial photography from Riverside Community College in 2010 to understand the guidelines of commercial photography. It is not that I wanted to take the shots (though taking photography is always creative to me) but to train the interns or marketing assistants who have good hands in photography and are creative.

So when I do a photoshoot or work with interns or a professional photographer as a marketing manager or a director, I prefer to do some critical preparation to close the floodgates to potential problems that can arise on the day of the photoshoot: 

• Are there essential people from other departments or anyone from upper management stopping by during the day of the photoshoot? 
• Will any important meetings be avoided?
• I want to plan to ensure that the style of photography aligns with the company’s branding.
• I like to create a chart of the style and tone of my photographs so that it doesn’t diminish its effectiveness. 
• To me, communication is essential in making the right photography decisions. As I mentioned before, I did pretty good research before the photoshoot about the visual references from the Internet and past examples of previous corporate photos. That can provide a clear idea as an example of the preferred creative outcome.
• Proper communication with the interns or professional photographer will give a solid idea of timing, equipment requirements, size of the corporate team, and any special needs.