so what are flat lays anyway?

One of the areas of photography I dabble in behind the scenes is taking stock images. These are photographs of everyday places, people and objects that can be used for marketing, social media feeds or published in books or magazines. However today I want to talk about a specific style of stock image – Flat Lays. 

I tend to focus on still life images and in particular science-based themes. However, I will give most subjects a go!

Flat Lays

This is a style of photography that I had been doing, but I must confess that I am only now discovering that is what they are called!

Flat lays are basically a curated collection of objects laid out to tell a story and that is photographed from directed above.

You are probably most familiar with this style of photography shown on social media platforms and in particular Instagram. 

They are great fun to set up and play around with different compositions. 

I decided a fun subject would be one of my birthday presents. I was given a lovely bottle of raspberry and pomegranate cider. So before I opened it I thought I would play around with a flat lay image. I got a pomegranate and some raspberries along with a piece of hessian to use as a backdrop. 

I used my light pad below the set up to shine some light through the bottle, then used natural light from my window to light the scene. The only other thing I used was a reflector to shine a little more light back into the left of the image. I used my 50mm lens and I set my camera to ISO 100 1/6 Sec and f4.5

The Final Image

So how did this image turn out? 

Check out my Stock

You can see my current stock image range over on Alamy. 

Sara Sadler

Photographer

I am a fine art photographer based in the South of England. I enjoy sharing my photographic adventures, hints and tips.

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sarasadlerphotography.co.uk