How to photograph your products yourself

Get your digital camera out and do it yourself. That’s advice from a pro!

Today we are going to look at taking advantage of BT Tradespace’s new feature to add up to 5 images per product. You can take awesome product shots yourself to help sell your stuff! I will show you how.

What you need:

• A digital camera, any one will do as the images are for the web.
• A computer with an internet connection.
• And a nice clean bath – white is best.

Yes, I did say a bath, as I am going to assume you don’t have the luxury of employing a professional photographer for them to place your products on a studio backdrop. I will also assume that you don’t have your own lighting set up, a tripod, a white reflector and Adobe Photoshop. I can cover off how these will help in a later article.

It so happens my boiler has broken down, so nobody has had a bath in days, you however may have to give that scum a quick wipe down – baths always come up clean, unlike white card or walls. I have a Victorian ceramic roll-top and this seems perfect, but most white baths should be fine.

This is an ideal method to photograph something that is not too big and when you want to take different angled shots. For instance, it’s an electrical piece of kit like this AV sender (no I don’t watch SKY in the bath.) You may want to show potential buyers not just the front or top but the inputs and outputs round the back. Well that’s just dandy as BT Tradespace now allows 5, yes 5 different images of each product.

When doing this sort of exercise you may also want to keep the background consistent; well using a bath helps you to do that, as well as reflecting light into your product. Hopefully you have a bathroom with natural light coming through the window.

Step 1: Put your product in the bath and position it as you want in the shot, near to the slope of the bath at one end.

Step 2: Hand hold your camera in the bath really low and take some test shots to get the exposure just right -you may have to set to manual and overexpose a little to bring your product up clear, detail in the shadows and a near perfect white background from the bath.

Step 3: When you are happy with the cameras’ settings, sit it down in the bath and set your cameras’ self timer to a couple of seconds and make sure it is on auto-focus. Press the button and on focus your camera should beep, if not, set it to do so on focus. Let go off the camera and let it do the work, view and continue to move your product in different positions.

As you can see, there is no need for a tripod as we are on a stable surface and level with the product. No need for a reflector as the natural light and a curved bath is ideal.

Photoshop or some other editing software is good for cutting out your product from a cluttered background, but in this case you won’t need it. There are plenty of free photo-editing tools out there that will help you brighten the background if needed and crop the image.

I would be pleased to hear of anyone else employing this technique and taking it to the max. No bubbles please!