Taking good product photos

I love photography. One area, however, that has always frustrated me is taking product photos. Since my job has to do with ecommerce, friends often ask me to help them with taking product shots and it is always hard. The problems are wide-ranging – the product is not fully lit all around and looks flat; the shadows are too harsh; parts of the product seem out of focus. And so on. And then I have to put a picture into an image editing program such as Adobe® Photoshop® and labor for hours to get it just right. Honestly, I try to avoid taking product shots as much as I can.

Over time I have tried a few different devices – light boxes, domes, pads, reflectors, special lights, you name it. Many of these devices are fairly expensive and often not very flexible – something that is good for jewelry tends not to work for apparel, etc. More importantly, they just did not really help me.

Given how important great pictures are to conversion, this is a problem that needs to be solved. Most merchants need a way to solve it without having to pay $300 per shot to the pros – that adds up quickly.

The other day I came across Robert Morrissey from Morrissey Enterprises and his ProShot Boxx –proshotboxx.com ProShot Boxx is a very simple-looking box, inexpensive ($499.00) and easy to handle. What impressed me the most were the results. I am including some of the pictures I took – they were not professional shots, but given that I spent about 30 minutes on the whole process, I was quite impressed with the way they came out.

The box comes with a white and black background – I tested both. Also, it took me a few shots to tweak a few parameters – using a tripod and setting aperture very high (F18) helped quite a bit with making the images sharp. Other than that, the camera and the box took care of the rest. I did a little bit of post-processing in iPhoto®, but very little – 30 seconds per photo, not more.

Finally, Robert runs a website called f-stopcafe.com. On this website he has a number of tutorials geared at helping people take better photos. By understanding the photographic process you get a better grasp on how to take better photos. At f-stop café there are tutorials that cover the simple to the complex / from beginner to advanced. He has agreed to give the first 300 Yahoo! Merchant Solutions customer who come to this website a free 3 month membership. Sign up is here: www.f-stopcafe.com/gurucafe.

Thanks

Dmitri Krakovsky
Vice-President of Products, Yahoo! Small Business