Upgrade Your Product Photography Techniques by Integrating Theme

Give life to inanimate objects by surrounding them with a unique story

Tim Chuon
5 min readApr 19, 2020
The Dragon, a miniature from a board game called “The Grimm Forest”

Inanimate objects are difficult to photograph because well…they have no emotion; it’s hard to make them interesting. Sometimes we get lucky and have an emotion portrayed on their sculpture, as seen in The Dragon above. However, that’s all we get. We can’t ask it to look sad. We can’t ask it to tilt its head downward. We can’t manipulate the emotions and positioning as we would for a human model. On the upside, this acts as a wonderful training exercise for photographers because we’re forced to work with limitations; it allows us work with what we have so that when we do have full creative control, our ideas are more controlled and purposeful.

In this article, we’ll take a look at 3 photographs and see how you can incorporate better storytelling for your product photography. However, understanding theme can drastically improve all aspects of your photography as a whole!

Questions to Ask Yourself

A big factor I hone in on when staging how to take a product photo is context; I ask myself the following questions:

  1. What’s the purpose behind the item?
  2. Does it have its own story? Does…

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Tim Chuon

Photographer & Videographer | Instagram + YouTube @timchuon | I write about photography concepts that help you improve. https://linktr.ee/Timchuon