Photographing your own products properly

Product photography is the one part of a small shop where doing it yourself is genuinely competitive, because the thing that makes product photographs work is consistency and light rather than equipment.

What actually matters

1. 01One large soft light source. A window on an overcast day, or a window with a white sheet over it, beats any lamp you are likely to buy. Large and soft is the whole trick: it wraps around the object and makes the edges readable.
2. 02Something white to bounce light back into the shadow side. A sheet of white card is enough and it is the difference between a photograph that looks taken and one that looks lit.
3. 03A plain, consistent background. Not necessarily white, but the same one every time, because a catalogue in which every item sits differently looks amateur even when each photograph is fine.
4. 04A fixed camera position. A tripod, or the phone propped against books. Consistency between shots matters more than any single shot.
5. 05A current phone. Genuinely sufficient for most products. Camera equipment is the last thing to fix, not the first.

The set a product page needs

• The plain one. The whole object, square on, nothing else in frame. This is the image that appears in listings and search results and it should be boring on purpose.
• Scale. The object beside something whose size everybody knows, or in a hand. Dimensions in the text are necessary and insufficient; people do not convert centimetres into a mental picture.
• The detail. Whatever a customer would turn over and inspect: the stitching, the connector, the finish, the underside.
• In use or in place. Where it lives and what it does, which is the image that makes somebody want it.
• The flaw, if there is one. An honest photograph of the knot in the wood or the variation in the glaze prevents a return and reads as confidence.

Editing, lightly

Straighten, crop to a consistent aspect ratio, correct the white balance so white is white, and lift the exposure until the background reads clean. Stop there. The temptation is to saturate the colour until the product looks better than it is, which converts well and comes straight back as a return, with a customer who now believes your photographs are not to be trusted.

Export at a sensible size rather than at camera resolution. A product photograph displayed at 800 pixels does not need a 4,000 pixel file, and shipping the full file is one of the common reasons a shop is slow on a phone.

Build it as a repeatable setup

The real win is not one good session. It is marking the tripod position, the background and the time of day so that the product you add in three months matches the ones you shot today. A catalogue where every item is lit the same way looks professional in a way that no individual photograph does, and a mismatched one looks careless however good the newest picture is.

Short video, and what it is for

A few seconds of the product being handled answers questions no photograph does: how it moves, how heavy it looks when lifted, what the surface does in changing light. For anything whose appeal is tactile, it is the highest-value shot you can add.

• Keep it short and loop-friendly, with no titles or music. It is information, not a film.
• Shoot it in the same light as the stills, so the colour matches. A video that shows a different shade than the photographs undoes the trust both were meant to build.
• Hands in frame are good. They establish scale and weight in a way that no measurement does.
• Hold the camera still and move the object, which is easier than the reverse and reads better.
• Serve it so it does not slow the page: no autoplaying heavy file, a poster image, and the video loaded on demand.

The shots for advertising are a different job from the shots for the listing, and mixing them up wastes both. A listing image should be plain, square and legible as a thumbnail. An advert needs movement in the first second and has to work with no sound. Shoot them in the same session with the same setup, and keep the sets separate.