Lockdown has been a bit of a learning curve with regards product and commercial photography, especially when looking at the work I do (mostly family portrait photography and wedding photography) and with lockdown coming right at the point of year when my business has just had it’s ‘winter lull’ (the quiet period after Christmas where everyone is trying to get their finances back in line or are just simply snuggled up at home keeping warm, rather than thinking about all the wonderful winter photos they could get outdoors! Anyway, with the arrival of spring my work usually really picks up, with bluebell photo shoots and the wedding season starting to get busy…
This year has been the total opposite, with lockdown shutting down the start of my photography season, re-scheduling multiple weddings and basically causing havoc for pretty much everyone in the country. I was however pleased to see that some commercial photography work was still coming in. With the drastic shift to everyone shopping online I got a mini influx of work from people who normally sell in person, asking me to photograph their products for sale online.
These companies normally sell their products all over the world through trade shows (which again have all been cancelled this year) and they desperately needed photos so that they could show off their products to new potential customers. So apart from photographing their products (beautiful Spanish Ceramic plant pots in this case) I was asked to photograph their exhibition stand in such a way that they could display it virtually, which made it a perfect fit for my virtual tour commercial photography work. So all in all, despite loosing a lot of business to Covid-19 and the 3-4 months of lockdown that we’ve had, I was happily kept busy planning and shooting commercial photos for two big names in the garden planters business world (Woodlodge – who are huge in the UK, and Sunshine Ceramica, who are big in the USA).
All in all, it’s been a learning curve to make sure that I keep up my commercial photography work, which I really enjoy doing, and to network around that for potentially new commercial customers. Because anyone who’s got a physical product to sell needs great photos. And that’s what I’m here to do.
