getting creative with product photography

Most creators know who Peter Mckinnon is

If for some reason you don’t, he’s an OG YouTuber that did for photography what Casey Neistat did for vlogging. If you don’t know who Casey Neistat is, well, that’s a whole other conversation. Anyways, the other day Peter published a YouTube Short that was titled “Just share it. Post the work”, which was a beautiful reminder that even content you long forgot about, lost passion for, or simply deemed not good enough to go on the internet is still worthy of being shared with the world.

His call-to-action at the end that said to “scrape the archives” for some reason really stuck with me, and like he instructed me to do, I took a trip down memory lane by going through some old Lacie drives to see what work I had buried in the sands of time.

And there it was - a project I was once very passionate about and one I’m still very proud of during my time as the Social Media Manager for 5.11 Tactical. It was a folder that contained shots I took for a unique series of social media posts that utilized product photography in a way the company never did before (and hasn’t done since).

Nobody asked me to do it

The idea was relatively simple: use the setup that I would normally use for our product photography, but add sketches and notes written by the design team to present a behind-the-scenes story of how our products were made, and then combine that with rulers, cutting mats, and X-ACTO knives as props to give it a “de-constructed” aesthetic.

There was no email from my project manager, no personal request from our VP of Marketing, and no last-minute favor from our Creative Director that asked me to make these. Usually one of those three things would happen when someone other than my boss asks if I could create a photo or video asset that they couldn’t otherwise task a busy member of our creative team to do. No, I did this for one reason and one reason only - I just wanted to.

See, I had somewhat of a nontraditional day-to-day at 5.11. On paper, I was responsible for everything you’d expect a social media manager to be responsible for at one of the largest gear, apparel, and footwear brands for first-responders and fitness/outdoor enthusiasts on the planet. However, I was also responsible for a lot of things not in my job description - namely helping out with anything that related to our professional photography studio such as creating e-commerce product photography.

That studio was essentially my second office, and my proficiency in being able to use the equipment in the workspace (softboxes, reflectors, backdrops, etc) meant I was trusted to not only create projects beyond the realm of social media, but also create whatever I wanted in there (even personal projects from time to time).

my inspiration came during the height of the streetwear era

So this would be like mid-late 2017 when the Yeezy 350 V2 were releasing new colorways for the first time. I remember the days people camped overnight at Adidas stores to wait in line for them otherwise you had to pay thousands of dollars in resale prices (oh what a time lol). But “hypebeast” culture brought by other brands like Supreme and Off-White also made it trendy for social media content creators to get into product photography. Being another impressionable millennial that followed (and bought into) the streetwear phase, I learned a newfound appreciation for that genre of photography that I previously associated with subjectively boring laydown shots on white or neutral backgrounds.

I had bought an excellent book titled “Sneakers” that had stories and excerpts from renowned footwear designers like Sophia Chang, Tinker Hatfield, Alexander Wang, and of course Virgil Abloh. Many of the pages had early sketches or prototypes of shoes in their early design phases, and that’s what inspired me to tell a similar story with 5.11’s products on social media.

In order for my idea to work, I had to get some of the designers on board with it given that they owned the sketches I’d need. Luckily, it didn’t take much convincing as the talented designers (whom I rarely saw because they worked on a different floor) were honored to be featured in such a way - I even did some mini interviews that provided me with quotes and design stories to use in the copy of this product campaign I had ideated. Any documents I used were notably checked to make sure I wasn’t revealing any 5.11 secret sauce or proprietary information, but otherwise I was free to use them as I wished.

Nobody knew that audience better than me

The intricacies of how successful any company’s digital marketing efforts are boil down to how well you know your target audience. Reviewing the metrics on which social posts are best for sales conversions, which type of emails have poor open rates, and what kind of videos will get people into your store or onto your website will tell you a lot about who your customers are.

But at the end of the day, a social media manager has a very intimate knowledge of what their respective audiences like by nature of being in the weeds day in and day out interacting with positive and negative comments.

I knew the 5.11 audience would resonate well with these types of product posts. Historically, typical plain-background product photography didn’t perform well outside of paid ads because there’s just not a lot going on to engage with. But the customer who works as a first-responder loves features, modality, and functionality - and the story of how those things were brought together was the story I was telling through 5.11’s designers and sketches.

How gear was made to be purpose-built for the tough demands of their careers is far more interesting to them (and way more likely to incite a buying decision) than showing a product on a plain background.

there should be two takeaways from this article

The first being an encouragement to think outside the box on how you present your product photography. One of the things I do best is visual storytelling, which allows me to have a keen understanding on how to take what’s important to a brand’s audience and combine that with successful digital marketing. Inspiration can be found anywhere when you’re looking to create from a place of passion and genuine love for what you do.

And the second being Peter McKinnon was right - go scrape your old hard drives or folders for work or personal projects you forgot about. Chances are, there’s a treasure trove of things there that maybe once you were too unsure could be shared but now you can make a great story out of.