I’m lucky to be surrounded by a ton of friends and family who are WAY into photography, so now that Jimmy’s got some new equipment, said friends & family have started hearing from us. =]

While they’re definitely far from perfect, I started working more on my own product photos about the beginning of summer this year. My goal was to take better photos at the outset so that I wouldn’t have to spend as much time fussing with the file in Photoshop, since my bag of Photoshop tricks is quite small and the whole experience can be plenty time-consuming and frustrating.

For example, at one time I shot photos against a red towel and used the magic wand in Photoshop to get rid of the background, and after a couple of hours for the set of photos, this is the kind of less-than-stellar result I ended up with:

Ack! The edges are ugly and you can even see a red glow on the fabric. Woops! I used the red towel because I thought that the color contrast would be easier to select using the magic wand in Photoshop, but obviously this was not quite the right approach. I’ve since switched to a white background and skipped the whole step of trying to delete the background. The result, while not perfect, is still clean and saves me a WHOOOOLE lot of time. Both shots below are taken against a sheet of white craft foam. The one on the left is taken with our Canon PowerShot SD800 point-and-shoot, and the one on the right with Jimmy’s Nikon D60 DSLR.

I don’t get the perfectly white background I originally wanted, but again, I sure do save a ton of time. I’ve got  a ways to go, but hopefully the new photographer in the family, along with help from brother-in-law, will be able to help me out! =D

In my initial research, I found a bunch of articles that were really helpful in terms of giving me ideas about lighting, backdrops and styling, among other things. I thought I’d dig these up again, which is actually a great thing for me because there are a bunch of neat tips that I totally forgot about!

TableTop Studio has a whole index of product photography articles, broken into different product type categories. I checked out the one on Clothing Photography Techniques, which offers a bunch of great examples illustrated with plenty of setup and before-and-after photos. In it, they stress the importance and value of finding photos that you like of items in your category and studying what makes the photo/styling appeal to you. That sounds obvious but I get caught up and forget to do my homework there. They also demonstrate the technique of laying your item flat on the floor, steamed and stuffed with cotton batting and/or tissue paper for added dimension, and photographing it from above. I haven’t quite gotten there with this technique, but these are a couple of my attempts (flat and minimally stuffed on left, not flat but stuffed on right):

TableTop Studio also has a blog with more how-to articles.

Then there’s Photojojo’s article on Shoot to Sell: Taking Better Photos for eBay, Etsy & Instructables. Although perhaps better suited for small objects, I really liked the section about playing with different backdrops like wood, fabric, metal. There are a couple of neat examples of jewelry photos, one set against blue leather or vinyl, and the other atop a page of a book. The tip I did try out was to recruit a cute friend to model my products! We only did this once so I need to work this back into the mix, but here she is!

Finally, Etsy had a couple articles of its own on getting better product photos:

• Shop Makeover Series: Photographing for Success
• Give Props: How to Style Your Photos

…not to mention a fun video!

Well, I look forward to making my way towards better and better product photos. Actually I have to admit, I look forward more to the end result of better product photos, not as much the path to getting there! <=P After all, my main goal is bags, baby. BAGS! =D

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