Improve Your Image and Sell More Products

An often-overlooked aspect to selling products on-line is the quality of the product image. When shopping on-line, where a product cannot be physically touched, the quality of the image is a critical. This is especially true for specialty items and one of a kind items like antiques. Studies have shown that quality and quantity of product images can improve on-line sales. Including many quality images of your products, shot from many angles will help promote your sales.

Obviously an online retailer could hire a professional photographer and spend thousands of dollars, but why burn up your profits when today's digital cameras make it easy for anyone to produce professional results. All that is needed is a quality digital camera and some photography studio lighting equipment. The equipment that you will need depends to a great extent on the size of the products being sold. Very small products like jewelry are best photographed with a self contained "Table Top Studio" that includes lights, background and platform in one apparatus. Medium sized objects like small appliances are best shot with a photo flood setup and larger objects like people and vehicles are best photographed with strobe lighting.

Flood and strobe lighting kits usually include a tripod, a background paper rack and seamless background paper and can be purchased for under $600. The minimum number of lamps that can produce satisfactory results is 2 but 3-4 lamps are more versatile and can be used to create "back lighting" and other effects.

Find a location for your photo studio setup that is at least 10 by 12 feet in dimension and where the ambient (room) lighting can be controlled (switched off). A room with minimal windows or "black out" shades is best to avoid the unwanted effects of sunlight.

Using Flood Lighting
Photo Flood lighting is a very convent lighting source because you can see exactly what your image will be prior to shooting. Assure that your digital camera has "auto (or selectable) white balance" control to compensate for the "color temperature" of the lamps. Also, use a power strip for the flood lamps and only turn them on for the photograph. Photoflood lamps have a very short burn life of about 20 hours. Do not leave them on like room lights. They also produce a lot of heat.

Use of Strobe Lighting
Strobe lights are powerful and therefore are only suitable for imaging large products. Most strobe lights must be at least 8 feet from the subject and can washout the image if too close. The main difficulty with strobes is "triggering" them. Professional camera equipment is equipped with a connector to connect a cable from the camera to the "primary" strobe source. Most digital cameras contain a "built in" strobe and do not have an "output trigger" connector. The solution is to select strobe lighting units that are "slave" units that will trigger from the flash on the camera. Then place a metal deflector in front of the strobe on the camera to deflect the light from the camera to one of your slave strobe units. This will allow the camera flash to trigger the slave strobes without a physical connection. You can use as many slave strobes as you need because once the camera triggers one of the slaves, the rest will trigger together. Strobe lighting requires many trial and error set-up corrections, but once you get what you want, writes it down so that you can easily repeat it.

Selecting The Camera
Selecting a camera is difficult with all of the options available today. Some simple rules can help. If you intend to use the product images for both print and web catalogs select a camera with the highest resolution you can afford. The 3+ mega-pixel cameras available today can handle the needs of print as well as web. If you only intend to produce a web catalog then 2 mega-pixel cameras that are lower in cost will fill the bill.

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Select a camera with a long optical zoom lens. 3x is minimally acceptable and 8x and above is perfect. Do not include the "digital" zooming factor that many high-resolution cameras advertise. The long optical zoom is necessary to allow you to shoot different sized products without having to move the camera and upset your lighting configuration.

Experienced photographers will tell you that once you get the perfect lighting set up, don't change it. Just change the subject. If your subject (product) varies in size from a watch to TV set, a long optical zoom lens will allow you to leave your lighting/camera configuration in a fixed position and zoom to frame the product.

For additional information on digital product photography and equipment, visit our web site at http://sell-it-on-the-net.com