Basic Product Photography For Home Sellers

This is the first post in a new ongoing series, aimed towards business owners whose sales depend on the quality of the photographs of their products, but don't really have much experience behind the camera. If you're selling on Etsy or eBay or your own web site, and you're frustrated because you just can't get the images your products deserve, then I hope this series will be helpful to you.

My assumption here is that you, as your business owner, feel that your product photography is holding back sales and that you’re willing to invest in the equipment and education you need to move it forward. The setups I’ll recommend will range in price, but to do it right from scratch will start at a few hundred dollars. It’s up to you to determine your budget, but as you do, you should keep in mind that this is a legitimate business expense — marketing is not optional, after all.

Your photography setup and workflow need to make business sense. At the moment they probably don't, since they're not supporting your sales. But any money or time you spend to get to that point needs to pay for itself eventually. The upfront costs of the equipment, the cost of your time to learn to use it, and the ongoing cost of your time to shoot and process the products all need to be recouped through your sales. How long are you comfortable taking to pay back this expense? Six months? A year? Longer? If you need to adjust your prices to do this, how will that affect your market?

A toy pachyrhinosaurus, an example of this sort of photography.

And eventually you'll need to replace parts of your photo kit. Fortunately, photo gear can last a long time if you treat it well, and you probably won't have a real need to upgrade every time a new camera body or something comes out. Your workflow won't stop working because somebody else has a bigger lens, after all.

Now, I'm a photographer and not a business specialist, so I'm not really the one to go into detail about how to do all that. You should talk to your tax adviser about making this deductible, and maybe even a local bank or credit union about microloans to make it possible if necessary. If you can’t make a good business case for it or you just don’t have the time or interest to dedicate to it, you may want to consider hiring a photographer to do it for you — for a lot of people, this is the more sensible route. (And heck, if you're in the Boston area or sell easily-shipped items, I might be able to help you out with that, since it's part of my business.)

Ideally, at this point, everything I've said so far is at least a little bit obvious and you're excited to get to the actual photography. Links to the rest of the series are below, or you can click here.

Lighting
Typical Lighting Challenges
Controlling Light With Diffusers and Reflectors