Taking Product Photos

One of the most challenging aspects of selling online - for me anyway - is getting the photos right. I'm fairly comfortable with camera settings and composition and I've taken hundreds of photos of views, sunsets and people...but I still struggle with product photography.

There's no doubt a good photo can really help to sell a product, and a bad photo can definitely put buyers off. So it makes sense to take a bit of time and effort to get the best photos you can when selling online.

An expensive camera is not essential - you can get perfectly good photos with a small compact camera or even a phone camera, but you'll probably need to edit them with Photoshop or other photo-editing software to get great photos.

I'd say my product photos are generally ok, but I'm never truly happy with them and, like most people, I'm continually trying to improve them. I currently use a compact Lumix camera for most of my photos, and I prefer to take shots against a plain white background. I find this gives a cleaner look, and allows me to get more accurate colours.

I use a couple of large sheets of white mountboard - one on the floor and one behind the object - and position them to catch as much daylight as possible without any direct sunlight hitting them. For me, that means in front of my living room windows, on a bright but slightly overcast day. Direct sun means deep shadows, which I want to avoid, so I wait until the sun goes behind a cloud, or move away from the windows slightly.

If you're not comfortable using your camera's manual settings, leave it on 'auto' mode, but turn off the flash. I never use flash for my photos, as it drains out the colours and creates an unnatural look. It's much better to add brightness later if you need to.

I take lots of photos, from different angles, to capture all the details of the product. I don't use a tripod, as I find that too restricting, but I'm careful to keep the camera as steady as possible, and I take my time setting up the shots. I can use this simple set-up for most of my products, with the exception of my silk scarves and some of my larger bags.

I love the idea of using 'lifestyle' shots to show a product in use, but it's not really an option for me. My house doesn't even vaguely resemble something out of Ideal Home magazine, and I don't have many blank, white walls, interesting corners or bare wooden floors to give me that trendy, chic showhome look. Nor do I have space to set up a permanent 'studio' just for photography - although that would be nice. (Maybe if I cleared the garage.........?)

Some products, such as bags and scarves, look great photographed on a 'live' model, but I don't have one of those available either, so I have to be a bit less ambitious and settle for a dressmaker's dummy, a chair or a handy hook instead! Sometimes you just have to get a bit creative.

Anyway, once all the photos have been taken, I load them onto my laptop for editing. I have a very old version of Photoshop Elements that does pretty much everything I need it to do and not much more, which is fine. So, I crop, I straighten if necessary, I lighten the shadows and brighten it a bit, add a bit of contrast, get rid of any colour cast, check the colours look reasonably accurate, and save the edited copy. Then I reduce the size to 1000 pixels width for faster uploading. And that's it. Repeat for about 10-15 photos per item, and you can imagine how long the whole process takes when photographing a batch of products.

I'm off now to take some photos!