How to create product photos

If you are a small business with an e-commerce Web site than you may have trouble creating high-quality product images. There are many reasons why small, or even mid-sized businesses, cannot post high-quality photos seen on national B-to-C Web sites. Here are a few reasons we’ve collected while talking to businesses in the midwest:

• There’s no one to update our Web site to post new products
• We have a camera and a designated Web site guru but the photos aren’t the best
• We want to post our products online but don’t know how to start the process

Here are two pieces of advice to post high-quality e-commerce product photos:

1. Buy an SLR camera and a portable table-top photo studio, OR
2. Ask your sales rep for a digital product brochure and if you can copy and post the photos online

Use photos from a digital brochure option

This is the optimal option you should use to post high-quality photos to your Web site. Every sales rep should have a digital edition with photos of the products you’re purchasing. There are many people who don’t care about photo credits but as a former photographer, I suggest you offer to either: 1) Post a photo credit of who owns the photo (the company) or create a page on your Web site that states where your photos originated from. The later option allows you to not worry about posting photo credits every time there is a new product thus reducing your work while maintaining photo credibility.

Purchase camera and photo studio option

This option should only be used if your sales rep denies your request to use the digital product photos. A digital SLR camera does not have to be expensive, but you will need a camera that can change it’s ISO, shutter speed and f-stop. You can study what a digital SLR camera is here. An SLR with at least 4 megapixels (they go up to 12 megapixels today) is all you’ll need to post small photos on the Internet. The table-top photo studio allows you to have the same lighting effects and should give your products equal quality across the board. The table top studio, like the ShaShinki Portable Photo Studio, should be set up in a room without windows. A room with windows will change the affects of your pictures even with a portable studio.

Basic photo rules

1. Photoshop is the basic, most popular and the best software to use to post photos online. Purchasing this software is the best thing you can do for your product photos. To lower the cost of this pricy software, purchase an older version. If you have access to a student discount, this strategy can drop the price by hundreds of dollars.
2. Crop photos close and at the same size for every photo. Save for the web at 72 dpi. What does this mean? You can read more about saving photos for the Internet here.

Of course a photo technique is specific to each businesses’ needs. This problem can be critiqued during a project with WBC.