Product Photography in Kolkata

Kolkata brings us three real, well-established industries rather than one dominant category: fine gold and silver jewellery, leather goods out of the city's tanning and manufacturing base, and packaged tea from a city that has been the trading hub for it for generations. Each one is its own shoot.

Filigree and Bengali gold jewellery. Filigree is fine wirework, often silver, twisted and soldered into patterns that only read at close range, so the shoot needs real macro detail rather than a standard product lens backed off and cropped. The failure mode is highlights on the metal blowing out and erasing the wirework the piece is actually being sold on. Antique and oxidised finishes complicate it further: they absorb light instead of throwing it back, so a rig set up for a bright temple-jewellery piece will leave an oxidised piece looking underexposed unless someone adjusts for the finish rather than reusing yesterday's settings.

Leather goods. A good leather shot proves the leather is real by keeping the grain visible, which means side light that rakes across the surface rather than flat light that flattens it into a plain colour block. Tan, black and oxblood each hold white balance differently, so a catalogue with multiple colourways needs a colour check run across all of them rather than one setting applied everywhere and hoped for. Metal hardware, buckles, zips, studs, throws the same reflective-surface problem as jewellery, just at a smaller scale and usually with less time budgeted for it.

Packaged tea. A tea brand typically needs three different things from one shoot: the compliant pack shot for the marketplace listing, a close-up on the loose leaf or the open pack so the buyer can see what they are actually buying, and a brew or steam shot for the website and social side where the pack alone will not sell it. The label still has to be legible at thumbnail size, the same rule that governs every FMCG pack we shoot.

Kolkata to Thane

Kolkata to our Thane studio is close to 2,000 km, the longest route of any city on this list, so budgeting for transit time matters more here than anywhere else. Once the product actually reaches the studio, nothing about the process changes: we shoot, retouch and send the files back with the raw frames, and the cycle still runs five to seven working days from the day the box lands.

Because the round trip is the longest we handle, send a spare piece of anything intricate rather than a single unit, since a reshoot means the same long haul in reverse. Jewellery should travel insured. If you sell leather goods in more than one colourway, send a genuine sample of each rather than assuming one setting will cover all of them. And as with every city, tell us every marketplace you plan to list on before the shoot: covering three destinations in one session costs nothing extra, going back for a fourth costs the whole job again.