5 Product Photography Mistakes That Are Quietly Killing Your Sales (And How to Fix Them)
I have a framed email on my wall. A client wrote to tell me their conversion rate doubled after switching to properly lit product photos. Before that, they had decent products and forgettable images. The photos weren’t broken exactly. They just had a collection of small, fixable problems stacked on top of each other. That’s usually how it goes. No single catastrophic error, just five quiet mistakes draining the life out of every shot.
When I came across Peter McKinnon’s tutorial on the five most common product photography mistakes, I found myself nodding through most of it. McKinnon shoots with the instincts of someone who thinks visually at a cellular level, and even if his world skews more cinematic than e-commerce, the principles he lays out translate directly to the kind of work I do every day: making affordable products look like they belong on a premium brand’s website. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube and then come back here for the practical breakdown.
Whether you’re a small business owner shooting your own products or a photographer building out your client workflow, these five points are worth drilling until they become instinct.
Step 1: Stop Lighting the Surface Your Product Sits On
Product on surface with unwanted direct lighting underneath
This one is counterintuitive for beginners because it feels like more light should mean a better photo. It doesn’t. When you direct a light source at the table, shelf, or platform your product is resting on, you create a second visual focal point competing with the product itself. The surface starts showing grain, texture, shadows, and reflections that pull the eye away from what you actually want people to look at.
The fix is simple: light the product, not the stage. Your surface will pick up natural residual light from whatever is illuminating the product, and that ambient spill is usually exactly enough. If your surface looks too dark, try a white foam core reflector on the opposite side of your main light rather than adding a dedicated surface light. That way you’re still controlling the light on the product, not fragmenting your viewer’s attention.
Step 2: Give Your Product Room to Breathe in the Frame
Product cropped too tightly filling the entire frame
Filling the frame edge-to-edge with your product seems like a way to show detail, but what it actually does is make the image feel claustrophobic. There’s no visual entry point. The product looks trapped rather than presented.
Leave intentional negative space around your subject. A good starting rule: the product should occupy roughly 60 to 70 percent of the frame, with clean, consistent space on all sides. That space does real work. It signals confidence in the product, gives the composition room to breathe, and leaves space for text overlays if the image is going into a banner or listing template. The exception, as McKinnon notes, is when you’re shooting genuine macro detail, like the texture of a fabric or the clasp on a piece of jewelry. In that case, filling the frame is the whole point of the shot.
Step 3: Modify Your Light Before You Reach for the Post-Processing Sliders
Harsh direct light on product versus modified softer light
Harsh light is one of the most common problems I see in small business product photos. The light exists. The product is lit. But the shadows are hard, the highlights are blown, and the whole thing looks cheap regardless of how expensive the product actually is. The instinct is to fix it in editing, dropping the contrast or pulling down the highlights in Lightroom. That instinct is wrong.
Soft, diffused light has to be built on set. A simple DIY diffuser made from white ripstop nylon stretched over a frame costs under twenty dollars and transforms harsh flash or window light into something that wraps around a product smoothly. You can also shoot through a white shower curtain hung over a window, which is genuinely one of my favorite budget solutions. The goal is to make the light source larger relative to the product. Larger sources produce softer, more gradual shadow transitions. No amount of post-processing recreates the tonal quality of light that was soft to begin with. Get it right at the source.
Step 4: Match Your Lens to What the Shot Actually Needs
Wrong lens choice distorting product shape and proportion
Lens choice is something a lot of product photographers don’t think carefully about until they’ve already ruined a shoot. Wide angle lenses like a 14mm or 24mm introduce distortion that warps the shape of your product, which is a serious problem if you’re photographing something with straight lines, like a bottle, a box, or an electronic device. That distortion makes the product look inaccurate and, in e-commerce specifically, inaccurate product representation creates returns.
For most standard e-commerce product shots, a focal length between 85mm and 100mm is reliable. It flatters the product’s natural proportions without flattening depth entirely. If you want to isolate the product with beautiful background separation, an 85mm f/1.8 is a workhorse lens that doesn’t require a significant investment. Save the wide end for lifestyle context shots where you’re deliberately showing the environment, and use longer focal lengths deliberately, not by default.
Step 5: Edit Your Props as Ruthlessly as You Edit Your Photos
Cluttered flat lay with too many props overwhelming the product
Flat lay and top-down product photography is genuinely one of my favorite formats. A well-styled scene tells a story about who the product is for and how it fits into someone’s life. But there’s a tipping point where “styled” becomes “cluttered,” and once you cross it, the product disappears into the noise.
McKinnon’s point here is blunt: if you add so many props that someone has to search for the actual product, you’ve failed the shot. A practical test I use on my own setups is to squint at the image until it’s slightly blurry. Whatever your eye goes to first in that blurred version is your visual anchor. It should be the product. If it’s the linen napkin or the scattered coffee beans, pull them back or remove them entirely. Props should direct attention toward the product, not compete with it.
What I’d Add: Test Your Setup in Miniature First
McKinnon’s five points are all about the final image, but there’s a workflow habit I’d layer underneath all of them: build a small test version of your setup before you commit to it. I keep a lightbox in my kitchen specifically for this. Before I arrange a full product scene, I test the lighting angle, the surface texture, and the prop balance using a stand-in object roughly the same size as the actual product. That ten-minute test catches 90 percent of the mistakes from this list before I’ve wasted an hour on the real setup.
When I helped my mom rework the photos for her jewelry business, this was the shift that changed everything. We stopped shooting reactively and started building setups deliberately. Sales tripled within a few months, not because the jewelry changed, but because the photos finally showed what the pieces actually looked like.
The single most important takeaway from McKinnon’s tutorial is this: discipline in-camera saves you every time. Soft light, correct framing, appropriate focal length, and a clean composition cannot be fully recovered in post. The work happens on set.
Watch the full tutorial on YouTube to see McKinnon demonstrate each mistake visually. Then pick one point from this list and apply it to your next shoot before moving on to the rest.