Hands on: Selling an image

I’ve just put my old wireless router on Ebay. It’s less than a year old, but when I upgraded my BT broadband package they gave me a new one, so I figured I’d sell the old one while it was still worth something.

Don’t worry, you haven’t taken a wrong turning and lost yourself in the networking section. It’s just that every time I sell something on Ebay, I need to take a picture of it. And to differentiate my router from all the others and make my offering more professional-looking, desirable and saleable, I like it to be well photographed and on a nice clean white backdrop.

It’s not just Ebay; photography is more and more a part of everything we do these days. And whether you’re auctioning old kit on Ebay, producing images for your business website or taking photos of yourself for a passport or driving licence application, you want them to look as good as they possibly can.

I’m going to show you how to take studio-quality product shots without a studio. There are two aspects to this – what you can do when shooting (you’d be surprised how far a sheet of white paper and a window can get you) and what you can do after the event using a photo-editing application.

Shooting small objects
‘Product shots’ could really mean anything, but here I’ll confine it to small objects such as my wireless router. The only thing the viewer is interested in is the subject itself, so the aim is to show it as clearly as possible without any distractions.

Here’s where your sheet of white paper comes in. I find you can fit most things on a sheet of A3 paper. If you don’t have A3, use two overlapping sheets of A4; and don’t worry about the join, we’ll deal with easy removal of backgrounds a little later. If you don’t have white, any bright colour will do and some items, such as jewellery, look better on black.

Lighting
The next thing to consider is lighting. I very rarely use a flash because a single camera-mounted flash unit produces very harsh directional lighting with hard shadows. If you have to use a flash, a plastic diffuser or a piece of tracing paper over the front can soften the lighting a little – or, if the head angle can be adjusted, or you can remove it from the camera, bounce it off the ceiling or a wall.

I find that ordinary daylight provides much better results though. So prop your object on its paper close to a large window, or venture outdoors. Bright, cloudy weather is better than full-on sunshine. If it’s too bright use a net curtain or sheet as a diffuser (see ‘Light tents’ in the kit boxout on the opposite page). If one side of your object is in shadow, another piece of white paper or card can be positioned opposite the window to reflect light back.

Use a tripod
There can be a lot of fiddling about, getting the subject in the right place at the right angle and adjusting reflectors. Placing the camera on a tripod will make things a lot easier. Another thing that can be useful is Plasticine or Blu-Tack – use it to prop objects at an angle to make for more dynamic shots and to show more of an object to the camera.