September Styled Stock Photos

This month's stock photo pack originated from a place of necessity in my own business (which is where a lot of brilliant ideas come from if you think about it...), as I started finding that I needed a more creative and on-brand way to showcase my digital offerings. 

New stock photos, cheatsheet downloads, a preview of a client's new site or a just-published blog post - I started to find myself in a position where I wanted to share a sneak peek on social media, but was craving options when it came to actually displaying the offering or piece of work. I wanted it to seamlessly fit in within my feed and feel more like a lifestyle shot with personality. 

The iPad shot is a classic way to showcase a digital offering, but it can be hard to actually get a nice clear shot of what's on the screen, and I usually find myself struggling to style the shot so it's not too stark but doesn't take away from the subject matter. It's a fine line!

So I played around and settled on this marble-meets-coloured backdrop option, deciding to also add in the hands holding the iPad, making it more personable and lifestyle-oriented, and also presenting the opportunity for coordinating nail polish, which I just couldn't turn down.

This first round uses a series of coloured backdrops that I had on hand, but if this is the type of thing you'd like to see more of, I'd love to know if there are any colours in particular that would suit your needs, and I'll get to work on those as well! 

As for adding your own content, all you'll need is a graphics program (I use Photoshop, but a program like Canva should do the trick as well) to add a new layer with a screenshot or saved image file of whatever it is you want to showcase. Crop it to the right size, rotate it to match the angle of the screen, et voila! 

I've included three crop options for each colour: horizontal, vertical and square (which is optimized for Instagram, as per usual). Though I originally pictured using these primarily for social media, when I released a cheatsheet recently with content ideas for brand photos, I actually ended up using them in a number of places to promote it, as you can see below. 

So I urge you to get creative with how you use them, and as always - I can't wait to see - enjoy!