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I really like how people have serious photography set ups. I think the camera stands, light boxes, etc all make for really gorgeous photos. I appreciate the skill and dedication.
But in reality, you can take perfectly fine, acceptable photos for eBay with literally any new camera or phone that you buy these days. Even some $30 camera from Walmart.
Here are the key factors:
–Keep the camera steady. Blurry photos are dumb.
–Use natural light. Why anyone would post a dim, dark photo is confusing.
–If you can’t use natural light, then make sure to use plenty of artificial light. You don’t necessarily need a fancy photo lamp, but certainly don’t just use the dim overhead light in your bedroom. If the image looks dim on your camera, it’ll look dim on eBay.
–Take photos on an uncluttered, clean surface. It’s insane when people post photos of items on the floor with a bunch of other crap. Just clear off a table top or a floor space.That’s it. It’s all about not being lazy and being intentional.
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I’ve been looking at getting one of the pop up photo booth setups, but I haven’t been able to justify taking the step up into it when I seem to have decent results without it. I do plan on improving my setup when I get my office set up, but more just to have a cleaner background that I can do either white or black depending on the item.
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I generally take my photos on either a small hardwood table, our sofa (neutral gray color), or on our hardwood floor. I try and use natural light when/where possible, but in many cases, my day job prevents me doing so.
I’m considering picking up a cheap light stand/umbrella as I sometimes find the lighting in our home to be spotty (we’ve got a LOT of lights, but many are pot light style).
I don’t want to spend much, and like the look of my items on a “real” backdrop, as opposed to a plain white light box, so I’m thinking this might be my best option.
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Jay, what you describe is how I take photos pretty much (with the natural light option), but I still have big problems with colors coming out wrong, and even coming out differently on different photos of the same object – typically clothes are the most problematic. For example, the color will be very different on the close-up photo vs. on the photo of the entire garment. Also sometimes I have to try several different background colors before I find one that results in the color of the garment being shown correctly. Do you and Ryanne not have these types of problems?
I’ve tried three things to get around this problem:
1) Adjust the light coming into the photo via a camera control that I think is called “exposure”. It definitely darkens or lightens a photo, but the resulting photos do not look good. So I try not to use it.
2) Adjust the light coming into the photo by adding a dark (or light) object into the photo and then cropping it out. Works ok, but what a pain!
3) use custom white balance control on my camera. Again, it definitely does something, but the resulting photos typically don’t look too great. So i’m not using this anymore either.Skycam – any thoughts or suggestions?
Here are a couple of examples:
1) check out the last 3 photos of this mink stole. They are all of the same object, but the 3rd to last has a yellow-brown tinge to it, and the last two have more of a grey/taupe tinge. All photos were taken outside in the same light.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-50s-Genuine-Mink-Fur-Stole-Wrap-Shrug-Shawl-Hollywood-pockets-EAH-/262666732025?ssPageName=STRK:MESCX:IT2) Check out first 3 photos. To me they look like three different shades of brown. How is the buyer supposed to know which is the correct one?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/KRAULAND-Mens-Wool-Loden-Coat-Brown-Austria-Glockner-Rear-Pleat-Vintage-/262691129968?ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT3) 4th to last and 3rd to last photos. Same background, similar shot, same lighting, different color. !?!?!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/COLE-HAAN-NIKE-AIR-Womens-Brown-Suede-Peep-Toe-Slingback-Wedge-Heels-Shoes-7-5-8-/262658437012?ssPageName=STRK:MESE:ITI would really appreciate any help on this. The photographing is the most frustrating part of the process for me. The camera I use is FujiFilm Finepix S1500 that I bought specifically for ebay based on a recommendation by a ebay photographer expert website, and I was specifically looking forward to the white balance feature to solve all my problems, but that didn’t happen. I take photos either outdoors or in my sunroom that has skylights, and mostly only when it’s cloudy, never in direct sunlight.
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Im pretty sure the problem is that you have have an auto white balance feature turned on.
Basically your camera is changing what it considers “white” every time you change positions. Set it once on manual and it will keep that white reading (and every other color reading) until you manually change it again or switch to auto.
Try manually setting your white balance and see if that solves it. You should try around 5600 K for outdoors as a setting and 3200K indoors under tungsten light or just shoot a white piece of paper and press the white balance button.
I hope this helps!
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I just looked at your camera manual online and if you go to page 72 you will see how to manually set your white balance. It gives you some suggestions on which options to choose from -much easier than picking color temperatures like I suggested. Try a few different ones till you get the color which is closest to real life and all your other pictures will have the same color.
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What I have tried a number of times is doing the custom white balance setting where I take a photo of a blank white sheet of paper in order to tell it what is true white. This definitely does something, but I didn’t like the results, so I stopped using it. Unfortunately I can’t remember exactly what it was about it that looked bad.
So what I will try next is the various pre-programmed white balance settings which is I think what you are suggesting. If that doesn’t help, then at this point I’m ready to abandon this camera when I upgrade my iPhone4 to a 5 or 6 and just use the phone camera on the new phone.
Thanks for your help, Skycam!
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If you’re like me and rely on your phone for photographing items to list on eBay here’s a small but I think important tip, clean your lens.
We’re always grabbing that phone and it’s easy to put an oily film on the lens. I use lens cleaning tissue that I’ve acquired along with camera kits I’ve bought over the years.-
Thats a good suggestion. Since phones are so cheap now, we use an iPhone 4 just as a camera and photo uploader for eBay. It stays safe and clean, instead of in our pockets.
These phones are really cheap, especially if you get the 8GB. You could also just buy an iPod touch. All wifi anyway.
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that’s cool that you get decent photos with your iphone4! I get mixed results, sometimes the photos are fine, and sometimes really awful. I want to change my phone anyway, so hopefully the iPhone 5 or 6 that I buy will be better.
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With any iphone, you just have to have very good lighting and it will take excellent pictures. Any camera will struggle with poor lighting. Better cameras are capable of having higher ISO levels to compensate for poor lighting, but higher ISO is always a tradeoff. High ISO always equals grainy pictures.
I have heard the new iphone 7 is supposed to be much better at lower light level photography.
As an aside, I recommend anyone who takes photos as part of their living (ebay sellers) should learn the basics of photography. Once you can take a DSLR camera into full manual mode and rely on the light meter to take properly exposed and focused photos, you will have the general knowledge to know when your light is good enough.
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Another tip for using an iPhone camera and the eBay app. Take the pictures in square mode before you start using the app. That’s the best way to view them on mobile- in square mode. You can’t use square mode when you are in the app.
Also by taking the photos first then uploading them into the app (instead of using the camera mode within the app) you can use the zoom feature. Its very hard to get a close up shot from your iphone camera within the app because you can’t zoom.
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Honestly lighting is my biggest challenge. The windows in my home office face north and I only seem to get enough natural light for a few hours in the late morning/early afternoon. I have 3 small desk lamps in a ghetto lighting setup to try to make my photo area brighter but I really am not happy with it. I have a feeling I need some more professional lights with diffusers on them.
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If money is an issue just pick up a couple of those clamp on work lights from lowes. Made by Bayco.
Get a couple of dimmer switches for them and you have a pretty good lighting set up for less than $30.
You’ll have plenty of light and can adjust the intensity when needed.
Just be careful mixing color temperatures- (daylight and tungsten).
Be careful with diffusers too. You can pretty easily diffuse away all the flaws on your item and then your customer will be in for a surprise! I have professional lights I won’t use for that very reason.
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Skycam, you suggested shooting pictures in square mode on the iPhone, do you have any other setting suggestions? I’ve seen other peoples listing pictures that I know were shot with an iPhone (Jay) and I don’t feel I get the same quality from mu iPhone 6+. Since I do have a full time job I rarely get the luxury of using natural light, could that be the biggest difference?
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I shoot my photos on a trash-picked teak table. I pushed it part-way into my fireplace and have a home-depot task light clamped to a floor vase shining on the items. For the most part, I get good photographs, with a warm wood tone underneath and a deep black background. Very inexpensive setup and the family gets used to having a table in the fireplace pretty quickly. 🙂
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Sonia, you are my photography doppleganger! I felt like you were reading my diary!
My husband built this set up for me and I thought it would solve all my problems
It didn’t. But I discovered that I got much better photos when I moved the entire set up to the edge of the garage door (my “shop” is in my garage) from its spot facing the window. I thought facing the window was da bomb, but obviously not. However, I still had major problems. Then I stumbled across a solution that seemed too simple to be true. I have one of those clip on style desk lamps with LED bulbs. I clipped it onto my backdrop so that it shines down on the photo table. HUGE improvement! Go figure!
Since then, I’ve discovered a couple blogs where they’ve commented that installing some of those running LED lights above and around the workspace, kinda like those starlet movie mirrors, works wonders. Bit rich for my wallet and doesn’t suit my photography set up right now, but something to work towards!
One other tool in my kit that has really helped is the MS Picture Manager. I use the Color Enhancer tool and the Brightness and Contrast tool a lot. Sometimes just one or two tweaks and everything’s good.
Photography is still my biggest bugbear, but I’m listing a lot of stuff now with these two fixes (the LED lamp and MS Pic Mngr.)
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