P is for Photography

For any online retailer, photography is crucial to business. Pictures are the main resource a potential customer has to decide if they will purchase your item or not. Customers want to see every detail, every angle, to be able to "feel" products with their eyes. Pictures can literally make or break a sale, and even an online business.

Here at Timberleigh Baby I'm usually so busy actually sewing new products or fulfilling orders that there is little time left for great photography. But in this new year I am working to improve my product photography with better lighting and better backgrounds.

I have used a light box in the past, which resulted in some wonderful photos. The colors were brighter and more crisp. Photos on the left show the "Before" and the ones on the right are the "after."

The downside to a lightbox - it works best for small items, but you can forget about anything that won't fit inside. It also requires lots of lights pointing in different directions which I don't generally have on hand.

Unfortunately, the cardboard light box got unknowingly squashed by another member of my house, so it had to be retired. My options were either build another lightbox or find a different approach. Of course, since I like trying new things, I opted to try a different method.

This time I placed my wooden desk right next to window in my craft room so there was lots of natural light. I set up a white piece of poster board at the opposite end to reflect the light and reduce shadows. This approach resulted in pictures with colors that were more true to life and no post-editing required! I couldn't believe the difference just a location change makes. It was so easy and effective that I think I'll continue doing my product photography this way. The one downside is that you can only take pictures in the daytime, so it takes some scheduling ahead of time.

I absolutely love my new and improved photography. All that's needed is a few small lighting changes and the time; I didn't even need a new camera! Hopefully with better photography my Etsy store will get more traffic and more sales. In fact, I'm counting on it. ;)