{Picture Perfect} How to take Great Styled Photos for your Blog or Instagram?

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is about how I get that perfect styled shot for my blog and Instagram photos. The truth is, there is nothing glamorous or specifically hi-tech about how I achieve these shots, it’s a few low budget items, a nice camera and a whole lot of practice! While their isn’t much that really goes into shots like these, they are hands down my favorite photos to take because I love the challenge of setting up a styled shot that is inspired and lovely. I know it may sound silly, but I take these shots for myself more so than I do for anyone else. You wouldn’t believe how inspiring these shots are for me personally, they are like my personal art form for expressing myself and a lot of thought and curation goes into each shot I take. So, if you would like to know my tips for taking the best styled shots, here you go!

White foam board: One of my biggest tips for taking that perfect styled shot is to use white foam board to shoot on and also as a reflector for the light in your image. When you shoot on a flat white surface such as foam board, the colors and objects in your photos always stand out and look super clear! I like to use one piece of foam board to style my items on and another piece of foam board to bounce the light onto the scene. It helps to get that clean crisp look without any hot spots of light since I don’t let my light source fall directly onto the scene.

Studio lights: I always shoot my styled shots with my studio lights. Usually just one from my set will do the trick. Because I want my shots to look as clean as possible, I find that my studio lights are the best way to achieve the whitest whites and the truest colors for my images. The studio lights I use are seriously nothing fancy, the whole set was relatively inexpensive and easy to store away, here is a link if you’re interested in checking them out for yourself.

A high quality camera: I shoot all of my styled shots with my Canon EOS Rebel T5i and my 50mm 1.8 lens. I find this combo works great and produces the best shots. When taking aerial shots such as the ones pictured above, I tend to set my aperture to 2-2.8 and place the focus on an object in the center of the scene. That way any items that are closer to the foreground, like flowers in a vase, get that lovely blur, but all the objects laid out remain in focus!

BONUS TIP!

Another question I get asked a lot is how I get the screens of my gadgets to look so bright in the photos I take, and the answer to this is simple, I don’t! Whenever you see an image of mine that has a gadget screen visible, I have taken that shot with the gadget turned off, taken a screen shot that I want to use from the gadget in question and superimpose the image onto the photo in post processing via Photoshop! It’s nearly impossible to achieve that sort of look in a real photo because you can either expose the lighting for the overall image or expose for the gadget screen, but you can’t do both, so I find this method is the simplest and creates the best photo over all.

So, now that you know my secrets to great styled photo’s, I can’t wait to see what you all come up with! Make sure to tag me in your Instagram photos @MissTrenchcoat so I can check them out and of course leave you a like and comment! Feel free to leave me your photo questions as well in the comments and I may answer your question in a future post!

xoxo,

This post originally appeared on Strange & Charmed on April 9th, 2015 and is being reposted as a Throwback Thursday where I select high value content you might have missed, and share it for any new members of my community! I hope you enjoy this feature!