Photos that answer the question before it is asked.

Published market rates are a fair anchor. Shopify's pricing guide notes that commercial photographers charge roughly $500 to $3,000 per day and per-image prices commonly land between $50 and $350, while Photoroom's industry data puts traditional work at $25 to $500 per image plus $150 to $300 per studio hour. Simple pack shots at volume sit at the bottom of that range; styled lifestyle photos with a model sit at the top. We quote per project against an agreed shot list, so the number you approve is the number you pay.

Coverage beats volume, but the floor is higher than most brands assume: ecommerce brands averaged 8 images per product in 2024. The useful way to think about it is one frame per objection — a clean hero, a scale reference, a detail macro for finish or material, one or two in-use lifestyle photos, and a frame per variant a shopper has to choose between. Anything beyond that should earn its place. Padding a gallery with near-identical angles adds cost and slows the page without answering a single extra question.

Yes, and it is a common brief when a range is being extended rather than replaced. We reverse-engineer the existing set-up from your current catalogue — light direction and quality, camera height, crop and margin, shadow style, background value — then shoot test frames against them until new and old sit together in a grid without drawing attention. From that point the recipe is documented, so the drift that made the original catalogue inconsistent does not start again.

Yes, and we recommend capturing both in one session because the second visit is the expensive one. Turntables, unboxing sequences, pours, mechanisms opening and garment movement all come from the same set-up and the same styling, then get cut for product pages and for feeds. Where the video is intended to carry paid spend, our ad creative team writes the hooks and variants into the shot list first, so the footage is planned for the placement rather than trimmed to fit it afterwards.

Products, in the finish you actually sell, and a little context: which items matter most, which surfaces the frames serve, any marketplace rules you are held to, and your brand guidelines if they exist. If variants differ only by colour, tell us which ones must be shot rather than adjusted. Send samples early enough for us to test the difficult ones — glass, gloss, chrome and anything translucent take longer to light, and knowing that in advance keeps the schedule and the quote honest.

They are genuinely useful for backgrounds, variant recolouring and quick concept frames, and we use them where they help. What they cannot do yet is guarantee that the stitching, finish, proportion and colour a shopper receives match the image that sold it, and that guarantee is the whole point of catalogue photography — it is also what keeps returns down. Our approach is practical: photograph the truth of the product once, to a documented standard, then use generative tools to extend that library rather than to invent it.

You do. Every engagement includes full commercial rights across your own channels, marketplaces and paid media, with no per-use fees and no expiry to diarise. We hand over the graded exports, the layered working files and the written standards — lighting recipe, retouching specification, colour targets, naming convention — so you are free to shoot the long tail in-house or with any photographer you like and still get matching results.

Yes, and volume is where a written standard pays for itself. Once the shot list and the studio recipe are fixed, capture becomes a production line: batched by set-up rather than by product, tethered so approvals happen on set, retouched against a specification by more than one retoucher without the output drifting. We schedule the difficult categories first, agree a weekly delivery rhythm so your team can publish as batches land, and tell you plainly if the deadline needs a second photographer to be realistic.

By measuring them. On the product page we compare gallery orders and hero frames, watch zoom and scroll behaviour, and read what returns say about colour and scale accuracy. In paid media the same frames get tested as ad creative, where the differences show up fastest. Those findings go straight into the next shot list, which is why the second project with us is usually cheaper per useful image than the first — we stop paying for frames nobody looks at.

Often, and it works well. We supply the library and the standards; your brand or media agency uses them. Because every export is cut per surface and named to a convention, other teams can pick files up without a briefing call, and the written specification means a photographer we never meet can extend the set correctly. Where we also run your paid social or creative strategy, the loop is simply faster: the people reading the results write the next shot list.