How to take product photos

 

Be sure to also have a look at our competition which is now finished, but has some fine examples and tips for your product photos.

One of the biggest reasons why talented sellers don’t receive the sales their products deserve is usually down to their photography. If you have spent hours creating something wonderful and unique you need to present your work to its best advantage and poorly lit and grainy photos are not going to make potential customers part with their hard earned cash. But before you say ‘I can’t afford a decent camera’ here are a few tips to on how to improve your product photography at very little expense.

Get to know your camera

Believe it or not you don’t need an expensive SLR camera with a variety of lenses and equipment to get a decent shot, a cheap digital camera with a minimum of 3 megapixels is more than adequate these days. It is worth reading the manual and understanding what the settings do though; although the automatic settings are easy and are great for your average snapshot with a little bit of effort you can achieve almost professional looking shots if you know what you are doing and avoid a lot of post processing in the computer afterwards.

I always use my camera on its manual setting. Then you can use your function menu to change the settings as required. Up the exposure setting a couple of notches (good if it is cloudy), change the light meter from evaluate to spot meter, switch off the flash.

Set the quality and resolution setting to high to prevent grainy images and the two settings I would set to automatic are the ISO and the white balance setting – this is the bit where you choose what type of light you are photographing in. AWB is automatic mode, you will also see a cloud and sun and choices for artificial lights too.

Last but not least is the macro setting the little tulip symbol you usually see on the dial on the camera) so you can get in nice and close and fill the shot with your product so the customer can really see what they are looking at. You should spend a bit of time playing with the settings and see what they do, these are the adjustments I make that work for me, but you might need to adjustment a little for yourself.

Lighting

You could of course spend money on proper studio lamps and table top light tents, both of which can be bought fairly cheaply online, but you can achieve the same results so long as you have a place in your house with natural lighting (I have been known to take shots in the bathroom before!) and large sheets of white card or paper. With the camera set correctly the results should be pretty good! One piece of equipment that does make life easier is a tripod and I fully recommend spending money on one. Apart from preventing camera shake, not having to pick the camera between shots (especially if you are doing lots of products in one go) is a godsend. Again these can be picked up pretty cheaply.

You need the product to be well lit from the front as much as possible but not in direct sunlight as this will cause over exposure. The spot meter setting in your camera will help to ensure the photos are as bright as possible – using the evaluate setting will create dull backgrounds. Watch out too for heavy shadows but using a white sheet of card or a piece wrapped in tin foil will make an excellent reflector to bounce and direct light evenly over your product.

Background

The standard product shot used by professionals time and time again has a white background. You can mimic a studio background drop by using a large sheet of white paper, tape the top end against a wall and allow it to gently bend onto the table top (I have done this using a chair too) which means you will have a seamless background with no horizontal lines showing behind the product and gives you an opportunity to move the product around and get the best angle for the shot.

If you want to play around with different coloured backgrounds keep them light and neutral as too strong a colour may detract from what you are trying to sell. Same goes for textures. Anything too textured and patterned will interfere with the overall effect. Another rule is to use a colour that contrasts with the colour of your product – for example if you are taking a photo of a pink bag, shoot it on a green background so the pink bag stands out, putting it on a pink background will make it disappear.

Another way to display a product is to use props or shoot it in a setting. Think about the function of your product and keep your setting relevant. If you make pots for example, display them on a table with flowers and a few complimentary items in the background. Don’t over do it though and keep the product you are selling in the foreground. If you are selling earrings, hanging them off the side of a nice plain mug can be an effective way to display them and show the viewer how they hang. Take your time and experiment – to pull this kind of shot off takes practice and perseverance. The right results can be very compelling and can put you ahead of your competitors if done well.

Composition

Whichever way you choose to display your product spend some time looking at your product and turn it around looking at all the angles to get the best shot. A straight on shot can look a bit forced; turning it to slight angle can make your product immediately look more inviting and natural.

Don’t leave too much space around the product – this is where the macro setting comes in so you can get in nice and close. Fill your shot up so it almost reaches the edges but try not to cut any parts off. Check for dark shadows and use your makeshift reflector to bounce light to parts of the product that need more light.

Overall don’t get too stressed if you don’t get perfect results the first time. Professionals will shoot 30 or 40 photos each time before they get one they are happy with – granted if you are shooting something that will be sold fairly quickly you won’t want to spend too much time on complicated background settings but once you have got the desired results the first few times you will get quicker and if you get your camera set up correctly in the first place you will save time by not having to do too much tweaking in photo editing software afterwards.

Photo editing

Photo editing software really should just be used to resize your photos ready for uploading into your website but if you do find your finished photos need lifting a little bit (and let’s face it most us can’t help twiddling a little bit) there are a few quick easy tools available all even the cheapest of software to get the desired results. The best tool in my opinion is brightness / contrast. Increasing the contrast will whiten backgrounds and keep the colours nice and bright and often that is all you need to do. I tend not to touch the brightness setting as this can lighten the whole photo too much and make it look over exposed or foggy. Another good fix for dull grey backgrounds is the levels setting. When you select levels you should see a box with a choice of pipettes. Select the white pipette then click on your photo in a place where you think the white needs lightening the most. Magically the whites will brighten up, but it may over lighten other parts of the photo too so
play around until you become more familiar with it. You can change the blacks too and is a fun effective tool.

If your background has a hint of blue or grey in the corners you can use the selective colour tool to take out just the blue tinge ‘ select whites in the drop down box then move the cyan and other colour settings until you get the effect you want. (Don’t forget to select preview). Or another easy fix is once you have used the contrast tool to get the main area of white as bright as you can use the brush tool to whiten up any shadowy areas and make the background really crisp.

If you need to do much more than this to a photo then you run the risk of the finished photo looking fake and you will be spending more time than you need editing a photo when learning how to use your camera effectively can produce much better, professional looking results.

How the experts do it

We asked a few of the designers on www.makers-online.co.uk to share a few tips on how they photograph their products.

Liz Hamman

I use a digital camera in macro mode and only use optical zoom not digital zoom as this gives a better quality image. Zooming digitally can be done with photo editing software later if required.

I prefer natural light; I find the best light is around mid-day when it is bright but overcast day with no sunshine. This gives good overhead lighting but minimizes shadows. It also means that I don’t have to use flash as this can drown out detail and texture and give highlights and reflections that I don’t want. Obviously in this country I often have to wait to photograph my stuff; I tend to save work up to photograph for when conditions are right. An outside studio isn’t great but it’s cheaper than investing in fancy lighting systems and when the light is good you also don’t necessarily need a tripod.

I like to use a plain white background as I find it doesn’t distract from the object. A white background also has the advantage that it bounces and reflects light around so this helps light the object. I like to use a large piece of white cartridge paper set up on flat surface next to a wall and lay the paper so that it curves against the wall onto the table surface. Place the object to be shot on the paper, set up the camera then just view and make sure that there is nothing that you see in the viewfinder that you don’t want such as a camera strap dangling down or a bit of dust/hair on the lens. Also best to make sure that you are not casting a shadow over the paper and object, if this happens alter the shooting angle either by moving to the left or right or lowering/heightening the camera angle. This is a good idea anyway as it can make for some interesting photos.

Take lots of photos because you can, it’s all digital!

Upload to your computer and use some kind of editing software eg. Photoshop, or there is a reportedly a very good free one called Gimp that can be downloaded from the Internet. I haven’t tried this program but have read some very good reviews. I then normally do very basic editing such as brightness, contrast and cropping and maybe sharpening the image.

http://www.makers-online.co.uk/artist/liz-hamman

Kate Hamilton-Hunter

My advice would be to have good professional lighting, preferably two lights and two reflector boards (which you can make by wrapping card in tin foil!) so you can direct the light to minimise shadows The next important thing that I’ve learnt is that you have to know your camera! In particular, understand how the white balance works, and earn how to set the white balance to the lighting you’re using. After that, get a decent photo programme on your computer and learn how to enhance your photos to full effect!

http://www.makers-online.co.uk/artist/kate-hamiltonhunter

Jayne Simmonds

Well as a novice…. I have always used natural light and made sure the camera has a macro facility. Beyond that I have always tried to create an environment that I believe is in tune with the end consumer…. for Know Your Onions, I hope it is someone that shops at Toast or Whippet Grey… and so I look at how they style their photography, to create the same ambiance.

http://www.makers-online.co.uk/artist/know-your-onions

This article was contributed by Karen Jinks, a freelance designer who owns chalkhillstudio and is creative director of UK Handmade.