What are the 7 basics of photography?
Aperture, shutter speed, ISO, exposure, focus, composition and light. The first three are the exposure triangle, and the last one decides more than the other six combined.
**1. Aperture.** How wide the lens opens. It controls how much light comes in and how much of the scene is sharp. Wide open gives a blurred background. Stopped down keeps everything sharp. For product work you usually want most of the product sharp, which puts you around f/8 to f/11.
**2. Shutter speed.** How long the sensor is exposed. Fast freezes movement, slow blurs it. On a tripod with a product that does not move, you can use whatever speed the exposure needs.
**3. ISO.** How sensitive the sensor is. Higher lets you shoot in less light and adds noise. In a controlled setup there is no reason to leave base ISO, usually 100.
Those three together are the exposure triangle. Change one and you have to change another to keep the same brightness. That is the whole relationship and it is simpler than it is usually made to sound.
**4. Exposure and metering.** Whether the image is the right brightness overall, and how the camera measures it. Cameras meter towards mid grey, which is why a white product on a white background comes out grey unless you override it. This catches almost everyone the first time.
**5. Focus.** What is sharp and what is not. Sounds trivial and is not: on small products a focus error of a few millimetres is visible at listing size. Focus manually or lock autofocus once, then leave it.
**6. Composition.** Where things sit in the frame. Product photography uses far less of this than other genres, because the product is usually centred and filling the frame on purpose. It matters much more in lifestyle work.
**7. Light.** Direction, quality and colour. Where it comes from, how hard or soft it is, and what colour it is.
The seventh is not seventh in importance. Get the first six right under bad light and you have a technically correct bad photograph. Get light right and a modest camera produces something that looks professional. If you only learn one of the seven properly, learn this one, and the single rule inside it is that a bigger light source relative to the subject gives softer shadow.
That is also why our advice to any brand buying gear is to buy light before a camera body.