Flat lay photography is a versatile sub-genre of still life.
Flat lays can be minimalist and simple, containing only key objects arranged in a well-thought composition. Or it can include dozens of small items, forming a sort of organised chaos.
Let’s take a look at some flat lay photo ideas for your next creative still life project.
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How to Get Started
The most important thing in a flat lay photo is the story behind the idea.
So, how do you make a good flat lay? Think about your story first.
Gather specific objects and plan your shoot. I encourage you to make sketches for your flat lay photo ideas in advance. Taking a few cute things and trying to arrange them in a meaningful composition might work. But imagining your photo and bringing it to life saves time and energy. It’s much more efficient to know what you’re doing.
1. Capture the Season
The best seasonal photos can convey the photographer’s feelings.
Winter can be a cosy season of hot cocoa and marshmallows. Or it can be cold and minimalist with Nordic interiors, pale colours and snow-white decorations.
My favourite season is autumn: Orange pumpkins, red fallen leaves, and last berries.
Perfect for a still life! So, how can we shoot it from above?
Brew some tea and add fallen leaves around it. Take your favourite rainy day book and make it the centre of your composition. Make it about Halloween or summer’s end.
Think about what your favourites are, and make a list of 10-20 props. Pick the feeling that seems like the easiest to visualise.
Finally, choose some objects to represent that feeling. Arrange them in a simple composition and take a shot.
2. Add Hands in the Frame
Whatever you work on, including hands in the frame brings your image to life.
Are you creating a food photography image? Capture hands serving food or adjusting napkins.
Or maybe you’re trying to capture someone’s workplace? Perfect! Let the hands of an artist, carpenter, or barista be your star!
Hobbies also have a huge number of narrative opportunities!
Capture your mom working on seedlings, for example.
If you don’t have a remote shutter release, it could be challenging to photograph your own hands. So ask a friend for help! Prepare your set and lighting, and ask your model to pose for the shot when everything is in place. They would need to pose only for a few minutes, and you’ll get your perfect shot!
3. Get Creative with Coffee
Coffee is my go-to object for any project. But it’s also the ideal model for a cool flat lay photo idea! There’s no limit to how you can use coffee as a prime hero of your flat lay.
Let’s look at a couple of them.
Make Up a Character
Coffee can bring you everywhere. A botanist can have a cup of coffee surrounded by Petri dishes and strange plants.
An artist can drink coffee for inspiration next to latte and espresso colour palettes.
Create a Metaphor
Use a coffee cup like a flat circle. That will help you come up with metaphors for creative still life photos.
What can be represented by a circle? A balloon? Ok, then shoot a set of coffee cups as a bunch of party balloons.
A planet? Create your own Solar system with coffee cup planets, cookie asteroids and a cake Sun.
Brainstorm some ideas for at least 15 minutes, and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to come up with stories for your next shoot.
4. Use Decorative Ornaments Made From Food
We already talked about food typography. If you liked that idea, but creating an entire food lettering composition seems like a bit too much, why not incorporate some elements of it into your flat lay?
You can draw swirls with honey, thick syrups and sauces. Honey is my favourite to use.
Here’s a simple trick. If you can’t make honey hold its form, make a paper template and cover it with honey.
In this example, I cut out a couple of swirls from paper. I took a white background (so the paper won’t be noticeable) and glued my templates to it with a simple glue stick.
After that, I covered the templates with honey and took a shot. Surface tension is a marvellous thing!
This trick works with practically any thick liquid like ketchup or jam.
If you’re not in a crafty mood, you can try something even simpler.
Use a small syringe to create drops and put them in beautiful little curves. It doesn’t take much time, but it looks cute and creative!
5. Show Ingredients Instead of the Final Product
The alchemy of baking is a perfect idea for a flat lay photograph.
Food looks gorgeous from above, especially pies. And there are so many stories you can tell with dough and flour!
Flour drawings
The Milky Way always comes to my mind when I look at scattered flour.
I thought it’d be a good idea to include silhouettes of stars and starships in a typical baking flat lay.
Make a couple of paper templates and put them in calculated places in your composition.
Once everything is ready, scatter flour on your templates and remove them with tweezers, leaving dark silhouettes.
It doesn’t have to be spaceships. Or flour, for that matter. Try this trick with spices or cocoa.
Make a silhouette of a dish you’re going to cook. Or a place or a character associated with this ingredient.
Decorated Crusts
Another way to make your baking flat lay interesting is to experiment with pie crusts.
You can create tiny flowers, stripes, leaves, stars, birds, and other fantastic ornaments!
I’m hopeless at baking, but even I can arm myself with cookie cutters.
Check this out for some baking flat lay inspiration.
6. Create Big Shapes from Tiny Objects
Objects can tell so many things about their owners. What they’ve seen, who’s held them, who accidentally broke them, who lovingly gathered and repaired them.
So why not use it to create a conceptual flat lay photo?
Create Silhouettes
The first way to create this flat lay photo is to imagine a symbolic shape and fill it with lots of tiny objects. Pick a silhouette. Choose something fun. I went for a fortress.
Draw this silhouette with a pencil on your background. And finally fill it with lots of tiny objects, somehow connected to your theme.
Fill the silhouette of a sailboat with sand, seashells, maps, and compasses.
Combine books, papers, pencils and early drafts of a novel to a fantasy castle. Make a dragon out of burned matches.
You can even create a sort of self-portrait in still life. Gather your favourite things.
And arrange them in a symbolic silhouette or on an outline of your own profile.
Use Negative Space
This idea works great for negative space too. Fill the background with objects and leave the silhouette empty. I’m going to use object lettering as an example.
I cut letters from paper to use them as a template. After that, I started to fill the space around them with different little things. It’s more interesting when your items relate to the content of the inscription.
For example, you can make the words Drink Me from potions, little bottles, keys and other references to Alice in Wonderland. I made my DIY and Try Harder photos from items related to artistic activities.
I used coloured pencils, brushes, paints, fabrics for patchwork, and stamps for scrapbooking. Lots of little things that I use for my photos, and that inspire me.
As a final touch, fill the remaining space with smaller objects. So large parts of the background will be visible only under the letters.
Then remove the templates.
I did it with adhesive tape, in order not to move anything around. Voila!
7. Make Ice Cream
By all means, photograph an actual ice cream. But you can also add a little twist to it!
Maybe you would like to enhance your flat lay with a chalk drawing, specifying the taste of each different scoop.
You could make it look like a blueprint of a dessert.
You also can fill it with all sorts of small things creating a conceptual flat lay.
Flowers is the first that comes to mind. And scattered sweets. And all sorts of berries!
Combine it with jewellery or cosmetics, and you get a gorgeous product photo.
And finally, the trick that makes your flat lay look like levitation.
Put your ice cream on a sheet of transparent plastic and set it a short distance from the coloured background.
All shadows that create the volume of objects will remain in place, but all shadows falling on the background will disappear. Your ice cream cone will look like it’s levitating.
This shot with splashes and cherries is actually made from above. Technically, it’s still a flat lay.
8. Use Colour Blocking
Cut some triangles, circles, and squares out of colourful sheets of paper or vinyl.
Focus on basic geometric forms and limit your range of colours. Make sure the colours you picked look good together.
You can use many bold colours, but organise them in a harmonic palette.
I can use my Suprematic Tea series as an example. Round lemon slices look vibrant and have a clear shape.
So I used them with geometrical figures made from paper.
I started arranging my composition from the largest spots of colour and most important objects (teacups and lemons). After that, I moved to tiny details.
This may look complicated since there’s a lot of little details, but actually, the entire process is quite easy and super fun!
Conclusion
This is only the tip of the flat lay photo iceberg. Try these ideas as they are, play with them, change them, distort them.
Use them as a ground for your own unique projects or social media sites. Stay inspired and best of luck creating your own perfect flat lay photography!
If you love these tips, take a look at our course to learn more Wow Factor Photography!