CAPTD

Product & Studio Photography Checklist: What to Prepare Before a Shoot

Product and studio work is the one genre where nearly everything is controllable — which means preparation, not luck, decides the outcome.

Since there's no weather or fleeting light to contend with indoors, product and studio photography is unusually unforgiving of poor preparation — there's no external excuse for a shoot that goes wrong. Lighting setup, backdrop choice and camera settings should all be decided and tested before the actual product or client arrives.

Client or platform specs matter more here than in almost any other genre: knowing the exact image dimensions, background requirements (pure white for e-commerce, for instance) and file format needed before you shoot avoids a full reshoot later. Tethering to a laptop or tablet during the shoot, where practical, lets you catch lighting or focus issues immediately instead of finding them during editing.

A clean, repeatable studio checklist — lighting, backdrop, specs, tethering — turns what could be a fiddly, trial-and-error setup into something you can run the same way every time.

A few things to plan for

  • Lighting setup tested and confirmed before the product arrives
  • Backdrop and surface matched to the final use case
  • Exact image specs (dimensions, background, format) confirmed with the client
  • Tethered shooting set up where practical for real-time checks

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Want the full lesson?

This topic is covered in depth in Lesson 10: Food & Product Photography.