Inspiration for unconventional product photography.

Making a new products recognizable and memorable in the 3-inch-wide, 20-millisecond-scoll-pause window we operate in takes something unexpected. Making it on-brand and attractive takes a little magic, and a lot of planning–or luck. At FINEX we needed all of the above to emphasize our brand’s design focus and our cookware’s iconic shapes while immediately differentiating it from the sea of lower-cost cast iron on the market. One style we developed was Useful Sculptures, playing off our heavy products, and our assertion that we were “elevating American cast iron.” 

I looked to the cosmetics, snack food and fashion industries for inspiration, and continue to keep an eye out for product photography that plays off the genre’s seamless white backgrounds and familiar use case standards. E.g.,

One of my favorite examples comes from Awan – an ice cream shop.

They could show their ice cream in cones or cartons, or flat-lay style: in cups on a table surrounded by color-matched accoutrement. Instead they show it in this arresting, stripped-down way that, yes shows the product’s texture and color, but also IMO, suggests their unexpected flavors and style before you even get to the caption:         

The cosmetics industry seems to have mastered the technique, here inverting the dewy-condensation-beads trope:

Or here, with sharp lighting and smeared product:

Or by slicing and stacking various shades:

Most product photography tends to commodify its subject, showing products centered on a white, featureless background, usually straight-on to the viewer. A lot of lifestyle photography loses the product in the scenery.

Both have their place but as long as we’re consuming most of our images on small screens with hyper-short attention spans I think we’ll see a new style continue to grow: one that centers the product strongly enough that it *could* serve on an e-com PLA, but subverts just enough convention to garner a second look.     

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Last modified: March 25, 2025