How does the beauty of simplicity photographer Peter Belanger shoot Apple products?

How does Apple take promotional photos of iPhone and other products?

Note that I said shooting, not rendering.

Apple official website's photos can be so exquisite, but also truly reflect the texture of the product and the light and shadow effect of the material, so that there will be no gap when you see the real machine. In addition to fine design, excellent materials and exquisite manufacturing technology, it can also perfectly convey the designer's concept. There is another reason, that is:

The product pictures you saw in official website were mainly made and photographed by an ancient craft.

After the positioning is determined, the camera angle is fixed, and hundreds of photos are taken with different lights to capture every detail of the product perfectly. After cutting and splicing, it is called a perfect product photo.

It is also a black border, why can Apple iPhone X be displayed truthfully?

To avoid ambiguity, you may need to add a prerequisite. Apple has used this method to make promotional pictures before to truly convey the texture of Apple products such as iPhone. In other words, we have already said Apple's marketing principles:

? IPhone advertising presents what customers can perceive. This seems simple, but it means that even the color of the advertising screen, whether the lens space is messy, the timbre of the speaker and the animation special effects control the appearance of the iPhone in the eyes of the world.

Photographer Peter Belanger. Source: The Verge

How exactly is it done? Four years ago, The Verge interviewed Peter Belanger, a photographer who took pictures of Apple products. He revealed the process of taking product photos for Apple:

Apple's team will design detailed shooting plans and drafts in advance. I explained this painting with photography together with Apple's artistic director. The first is the positioning of products, followed by lighting.

The materials of Apple products such as iPhone are carefully selected, and it is necessary to carefully consider the lighting to accurately and perfectly present the texture and quality of the products. How to express the texture of the product and how to express the light and shadow of the product is something to think about from the beginning.

After shooting, the next stage is post-trimming. This is also the most complicated part of the whole production process. Every surface, every light and shadow of the product needs careful debugging.

The whole process is a bit like dealing with photos in Photoshop: you can't do everything on one layer. For me, different exposure angles and different light intensities are just layer after layer.

Peter Belanger's working scene. Source: The Verge

Where did this come from? The demo video processed by Youtube shows the photographer in detail. Peter Belanger? The process of making and designing magazine covers for Macworld in a similar way.

More precisely, due to the secrecy of Apple, we have no way to know whether the production process of the new product publicity map is the same, at least it has been used and the effect is very good. Judging from the promotional photos of iPhone 8 and iPhone X, visual inspection or real shooting, plus post-retouching.

There are two reasons for this speculation.

First, even the wallpaper of Apple Watch will be carefully photographed, famous photographers will be invited, studios will be set up, lights will be lit, and flowers and jellyfish needed for shooting will be purchased.

Wired magazine introduced the shooting process in detail. The longest one took 285 hours and pressed the shutter 24,000 times. The well-known iPhone dynamic wallpaper is also cut from a real video.

Apple Watch face wallpaper is an animation process. Source: connection

Another evidence is that many people call out Apple's official product atlas, and the price is 199/299. The design of Apple in California was also taken by photographers, rather than fooling the official rendering.

The Bible of Apple Products Designed by Apple Company of California

But from that interview four years ago, we can sum up the basic principles of taking pictures of Apple products:

Real, showing the design of the product and the texture of the material.

This is quality.

When it comes to design and technology, Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief design officer, often describes it as "caring". This is actually a point worthy of scrutiny, because it does not refer to the traditional hand-made technology, nor does it refer to the accuracy and meticulousness of German or Japanese cars or other mechanical products.

"Meticulousness" more shows the pursuit of spare no effort to make products and product details, no matter how big the gap between raw materials and final products is, no matter whether such details as wallpaper, official publicity photos shooting and production will be noticed.

Photo taken by Apple for Apple Wacth Face, from Wired, provided by Apple.

Alan Dye, Apple's vice president of UI design, also made similar remarks:

Many people will ask me why Apple became an apple. What's the secret?

I would say, there are no secrets. There are many talented people here, but at the same time, they are very careful about details. They care about the details of the product, even if ordinary people don't notice it at all. And these details are just about the experience of the product.

If we go back, we can also move out what Jobs's father taught him:

Once, he and his father built a fence in the backyard. Father asked that the back of the fence be carefully built. Jobs said, "Who will look behind the fence?" The father replied, "You will see."

Affected by this, on February 1982, 10, Jobs asked all 47 Macintosh team members to sign a piece of paper, and these names were finally engraved on the inside of a Macintosh chassis. The engineer who signed it at that time? Andy hertzfeld later recalled, "This is a natural process, and real craftsmen should sign their works."

1982, 47 members of Apple Macintosh test their signatures in the chassis. Source: folklore.org.

And this is also responsible for the product.

How many days and nights have product design, R&D and testing team stayed up, pre-researching, establishing projects, R&D, screening materials, screening suppliers, and sometimes even dragging suppliers such as zirconia ceramic materials to test various technical indicators, performance, drop, signals and so on in the workshop. Finally, I made a product, which was the flagship of that year. Why can't you spend more energy to show the unique texture and light and shadow effect of metals, ceramics, glass and other materials when displaying products?

Being true also means not hiding others. Product is the art of compromise, but at least it has reached a perfect balance here and now.

That time intentionally or unintentionally induced hundreds of millions of viewers to misunderstand the product (when Apple stumbled, when the iPhone 6 first came out, there was a picture showing the side of the product, and the prominent camera was hidden). Even its true appearance depends on people's speculation and reasoning. Are you not confident?

Not exactly. Moreover, we don't think such an approach can satisfy all the people involved in product design, production and research and development. They certainly don't want their works to be wrongly beautified or even misunderstood.

What's more, the product itself is not bad, and the truthful presentation is enough to shut up many questioning spectators.

Apple spent several years making products designed by Apple in California. How much are other manufacturers willing to pay for the annual flagship product promotion map?

When it comes to financial resources, few technology companies in the world can match Apple, but how much does it cost to take pictures of products and retouch them later? This is by no means unacceptable.

According to the budget of releasing tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of RMB for a conventional mobile phone brand, it is also affordable to take a set of promotional photos of new products like Apple.

The key is that few brands are willing to spend as much energy as Apple to care about these so-called details. Not limited by budget and financial resources, just careless.

Once delved into, their rhetoric is estimated to be no different from the comments on Weibo:

We do do do some things badly ... but that's basically what this industry does.

Take an unreal effect picture, add some screenshots, and maybe take out a photo taken by a SLR and pretend to put it on the camera for real-time viewing.

Then crush the apple on PPT. Anyway, Apple won't care or care.

This is why some manufacturers dare to compete with Apple only on PPT.