Photography Tutorial for the Normal Person - No Fancy Equipment Needed!

First off, this is not a tutorial for taking perfect, studio-quality pictures with expensive equipment. This is a tutorial for taking good pictures of your products without a studio, light box, proper lighting, a fancy camera or even Photoshop. If you have $5 to $10 dollars and a camera and you want good pictures of your stuff you've come to the right place.

I take my pictures in my living room, preferably during daylight, but it doesn't matter much since not much light reaches my windows in this room anyway. I have managed to take good pictures at night using just my crappy standing lamps. I have two little boys and the nice thing about this is that you can't even tell how messy my house is, since I'm taking pictures up against a wall. Table space is a rare species around here, nearly extinct, so another nice thing is I use a stool, not a table. You do need a digital camera, but it doesn't have to be fancy, a point and shoot will work fine. For this tutorial I also didn't adjust the white balance on my camera in case you can't/don't know how.

What I do have is maybe three yards of cheap bleached muslin, a dowel, two clothes pins, a small length of wire (six inches or so) and two push pins to hold up the clothes pins, a stool, a digital camera and a fabulous FREE! photo editing program you can access on the internet. No download required. Oh, and a pretty product I want to list on my Etsy shop.

I'll divide this into two parts, Taking the Picture, and Editing the Picture.

Part I: Taking the Picture
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My set up is simple. I have a length of cheap, bleached muslin that I draped over a dowel I got at the hardware store and hung that up on the wall. You could tack the muslin to the wall but I found the dowel keeps the fabric from sagging in the middle. In order to keep the dowel up I stuck it in two clothes pins, threaded a small length of wire inside the clothes pin, wrapped the ends together at the top and hung it over a push pin in the wall to keep it up. It sounds complicated but it's not, the picture makes more sense. I also left the photos unedited so you can see just how crappy my lighting is! (Right click when expanding pictures so you don't have to navigate back to the hidden part of the post when you're done.)



Feel free to hang the dowel however you want - this is what I had in the house! Underneath the fabric is a stool and I draped the bottom of the fabric over it to create a seamless background. Looks like my fabric could use a bit of ironing:



Pretty fancy, huh? Are you drooling with envy yet? No?

The next step in taking the picture is positioning my item on the stool. Sometimes I prop my item up against the back, sometimes I put one of my kids on the stool to hold it (if it's a children's item), it all depends on the item. I try to think of one thing that might go with it and include that in some of the pictures. I also try to make my initial picture in the listing (the one that gets seen first as a thumbnail) a close-up of some area. I usually don't make the first picture a straight shot of the whole item. Make people want to see more! Here are a few examples:

My Crayon Bag for kids:


A pretty, insulated Pot Holder:


You can't see the whole item, but you can see how it's being used and get a feel for the "character" of the item. Leave your remaining pictures to show the rest of the details - make your first one pop.

The last step is to snap away. The cropping can be done later, but think about the angle while you're shooting. I shot the picture of Noby with the crayon bag at a low level - it's usually a good idea to take pictures of kids down at their level. We have a tendency to stand when taking pictures which usually doesn't work well with kids! For the pot holder I was just high enough so you can see the top and bottom of the pot holder but low enough to get a good angle with the bowl. Don't be afraid to take a whole bunch of pictures! I took 35 pictures of the potholder and ended up with 5 for my listing. I took pictures at a variety of heights and chose the one I liked best after seeing how they looked up close.

I never use a flash. I hate the way it looks and you usually end up with a washed out product with dark shadows behind it unless you have a fancy flash set up, which is the opposite of what we're doing here! You might need to bump up your ISO setting if you're not using a flash. For instance, with an ISO setting of 400 your lens will have to be open longer to get enough light - thus allowing for fuzzy pictures if you have low lighting. With an ISO setting of 1600 your camera will have more sensitivity to light so the lens can be open for a shorter time - thus allowing for a sharper picture if you're indoors. So why not shoot at ISO 1600 for all your pictures? Because your picture will also have more "noise." A good rule of thumb is to shoot at the lowest ISO setting possible for your lighting. I generally shoot at 400 when outside and 800 or 1600 inside. Here's an example of 400 vs 1600 indoors (click it to see it in detail):



So, there might be a little more grain but it's not a big deal. If you can't adjust your ISO don't worry about it. Use a tripod or put a few more lights in the room. I shot my sample photo for this tutorial at 1600 - I could have gotten away with 800 and had less grain but I didn't think about it.

You're done taking your pictures! When I'm done I put my stool back under the piano, fold the sheet up so the bottom is pinned up by the dowel (that way the front doesn't get dirty and little hands are less likely to pull on it) and I'm just minutes away from taking pictures the next time I need to. It's like a Murphy Bed for photography studios. =)

Load your pictures into your computer and move on to...

Step II: Editing the Picture
This is the part that intimidates people, I think, but it's really not that scary and you don't need an expensive program or fancy editing skills!

I have Photoshop and many people love it but I don't. I even know how to use it and I don't like it. I also have Microsoft Digital Image Pro which is much cheaper (~$60) and does pretty much everything Photoshop does (at least that I know how to do) and that works fine, but there's something out there that's easier, more fun, more user-friendly when saving and re-editing and FREE! People, prepare to have your mind blown: Picnik.com.

Everything we're doing today can be done with the free version of Picnik, which is extensive and fabulous, but the premium version of Picnik is even more fab and I use it, love it and highly recommend it.

So, travel over to Picnik and upload your first photo. I quickly took a picture of Noby wearing one of my bags. I didn't adjust for white balance and it's a little grainy and the composition isn't great - in other words, it's the perfect starting place for this tutorial. A semi-crappy photo! Here's what the screen looks like after uploading a photo:



Photo editing, for me, has three essential steps. Rotate: Make your photo upright and straight. Exposure: If you didn't have proper lighting edit the exposure and pretend you did! And finally Colors: If you don't have your white balance set perfectly your whites can look yellow. Bad room lighting can mess things up, too. Make your whites white and you'll have a happy photo.

Rotate: Click "Rotate" on the top left, then "Left", then slide the "Straighten" bar if you need to tweak it by less than 90°. Click "OK" when you're done.



Exposure: Then I either do exposure or colors next. Doesn't much matter to me. If I do colors first and then exposure I usually end up needing to go back to colors and tweak things a little further and vice versa. So the next thing we'll do is work on the Exposure. Click "Exposure" then click "Advanced". I don't like adjusting the exposure slider bar since that lightens everything and I don't want my blacks to turn grey. For example, here's the picture with the exposure pushed up:



Yuck. The bottom of the bag looks awful and everything is a bit washed out. The key is with the advanced tab. The "Highlights" slider brightens just the light colors, the "Shadows" button darkens the dark colors. That way you can lighten up your image without blowing out your dark colors. Pretty sweet, huh? For this image I'm going to bump my highlights to 21 (it was pretty dark in here), my shadows to 5 (adds in a bit of contrast) and slide the brightness to 13 for a bit of overall lightness. Play around with these settings, get to know them.



I also clicked "Local Contrast" and raised that just a touch for a bit more contrast. Don't raise this too much or it will look grainy and yucky. Click "OK" to get back to the main screen.



Colors:This is where we're going to adjust the white balance since we didn't do that with the camera. The temperature slider bar is your friend! My crappy room lighting almost always means my pictures are a bit yellow so I always find myself sliding the bar to the left. The left is cool, the right is warm.

I generally find some white on my product and adjust until that white is a true white. Don't worry about the background, we'll end up cropping most of it out, so it's okay if that's not a perfect white. The important thing here is making the product look good.

I like to keep a bit of warmth in my photos, so sometimes, especially if there's a person in the photo, I'll keep it just on the warm side of perfect white. Play around with it, see how you like it. For this photo I slid the temperature bar over to -19. Further and Noby looked washed out, less and the white of the bag wasn't white enough.



Looking pretty good, huh? We now have a perfectly acceptable picture we could save and upload and be just fine. But let's tweak it a little more, shall we?

First thing is that it's a bit fuzzy. Click "Sharpen" then "Advanced". The regular "sharpness" slider works fine, but the advanced options give us a bit more control. The "strength" slider determines how much contrast you will have, the "radius" slider essentially determines how far to look for the edges. I think I can't explain that well, let's just look at it.

Slide the "Strength" slider first until you get a good sharpness, then slowly bump the "Radius" slider up until it looks right. Too far and it'll look grainy - try it. Strength at 69% and radius at 1.3 worked for me here:



Now let's crop it. Let's first of all pretend that it's totally natural for this bag to be worn by a 3 year old around his neck. Now I think about my favorite parts of the item, where I want to zoom in, what elements I want to leave in and how the item is used. This bag, for the purpose of this tutorial, is apparently worn by 3 year olds, so let's leave a bit of the 3 year old in it, but not too much, since it's a bit distracting from the bag itself. We'll leave the details on how it's used for a later picture. I love the fabrics together, so I want to focus on that, but I want to leave enough of the item so you can get a feel for its dimensions.

I ended up cropping it to just above his hands - you can see how big the bag is relative to Noby. The bottom is cropped to just above the bottom of the bag - the whole bottom isn't needed, but a glimpse is nice so you can get an idea for how big it is. I wouldn't be afraid of cropping one of the sides out, but I liked how it looked with both sides included.



If I was thinking, I would have switched my camera to ISO 800. 1600 was pretty high given that I had some natural light coming in. So it's a little grainier than it could be but it's fine. I also wouldn't put a tie-dye shirt on a model - so distracting! - but it's what he had on and I didn't want to distract him too much so I could write this tutorial in peace!

Click the "Save & Share" tab, give it a name, specify how big you want it (I reduced it down to 1000 pixels tall - perfect for Etsy), I like it to be saved as nice as possible, so I go to 10 on the compression scale (best quality, huge file size) but if you want to save space on your computer save at an 8. Click "Save Photo," navigate to your folder and you're done! One of the lovely things about Picnik is that you can save it directly to Facebook or Flickr or send it off in an email and more! Check out all the options at the top there. Also, with the premium version you can go back to the photo from your handy History tab and pick up editing right where you left off at a later date.



See, it's not that hard. Two main steps - taking the picture and editing the picture. Editing has three essential steps - rotating, adjusting the exposure and adjusting the color. After that we can sharpen if needed and then we crop it to our liking and save it!

Let's see how our before and after pictures compare:



Pretty nice, and no fancy equipment or photography studio needed!

I guess my other tip would be to be consistent. If you usually take pictures of your bracelets on a white background don't suddenly have a listing of one on a black background. My pictures, at least the first pictures in the listing, are all on a white background, usually zoomed in and a hair on the blown-out side of bright. Here's a mix of some of my listing pictures:



They all have the same feel and look like they all belong in the same shop. (Visit my shop to see all my items currently for sale! katemcfauldesigns.etsy.com)

Stay away from the fancy effects. Don't use special borders - and you're probably not going to get in a treasury if you have your shop name or the fact that your image is copyrighted written across the item.

Oh, and I've used my sheet on the wall to get some nice pictures of my boys, too. I think it's written in their bylaws to never sit still EVER, so perching them on a stool helped keep them in one place. =)

My OTHER products:


Thanks for reading and I hope that helped! It's certainly not a comprehensive lesson on all the ways to edit a photo, nor does it include fancy tips and tricks, and if you do it a different way and get better results, great! Leave your tips in the comments! But hopefully with a few yards of muslin and a camera you are now able to take great pictures for your shop.

Online Portfolio

It's done! Check out my new portfolio:



If you want to see a bigger version click here. Thanks for looking!

Office Re-org!

Oof, it's been a long time since my last post. The more time that passed the more I thought I had to catch up on for the next post - which led to more and more time passing due to overwhelming procrastination... So, I'm just going to jump back in like I was never gone!

My sewing "office" is in the corner of my living room, which I talked about in a previous post. I've got two little boys at home so as much as I'd like a little in-law unit in the backyard dedicated solely to my craft, it's just not gonna happen. First of all, we don't have a little in-law unit in the backyard and secondly, if I leave the boys for more than a few minutes they will either a)follow me and pester me or b)kill themselves or each other.

So, with the need to keep a watchful eye over my angelic devils, my office occupies a corner of the living room, right in the middle of all the action. At least the baby is not really a baby anymore and I don't need to put big ugly gates around everything to keep him away from my scissors. He's 2.5 now and for the most part stays out when I tell him to.

The point of all this is that I have a lot of stuff in a little space so organization is KEY. I have about 8' x 12' to house my sewing table (the 4' x 2.5' table that used to be our dining room table) my 8' work table, my computer, large ironing board that I built, bookshelf, storage shelves, wire shelves with fabric, several bolts of fabric, all my inventory and shipping supplies. Oh, and the cat, too. She likes to sleep in my office.

My 8' work table is where almost everything happens, so it can get pretty cluttered, along with the wall that it's up against. That wall is the only wall space in my office, because the other wall in my corner is taken up by a window and a fireplace. But thanks to $11 spent at IKEA (okay, I actually spent much more than that, but don't tell my husband - it's the $11 that's important here) I totally reorganized the main area of my office, getting most things off my table leaving it nice and clean and wide open for my projects.

I don't have a before picture, but just imagine clutter on the table, with a huge map of the united states taking up valuable wall space. Here's what it looks like now:

So clean and pretty! I made the blue and yellow quilt out of t-shirts that my boys wore when they were babies - that quilt even made it into a quilt book! Terrific Tees by Roberta DeLuz. It's a great book on how to quilt with t-shirts. The beach scene to the left is a little wall hanging I felted out of wool that I dyed.

Here's a close up of my new organizing:

My $11 bought that bar there above my cutting mat that I screwed into the wall, 10 hooks, 3 hanging clips and 3 buckets for my supplies. My supplies used to be in jars on the table, but it's much nicer to get them out of the way. One bucket holds pens, markers and pencils, the other holds craft scissors, sewing scissors and rotary cutter, and the other bucket holds craft glue and a few other random supplies I use often. I hung my clipboard with my instructions for my current projects, and a clip holding my open orders. I hung a pin cushion with thread catcher (that I make and sell on my Etsy site) from the bar, too. That little bar got rid of a lot of clutter!

Some other things I bought were a couple packets of 6x4 picture frames (four for $1.29) and a snazzy green lamp (on sale for $1.99). Gotta love IKEA! Above the bar I framed four close ups of some of my products with nice colors, for a little bit of inspiration:

On the other end of my table is the bulletin board I made with old corks, a magnetic strip for odds and ends (bought a long time ago at IKEA) and a few of my drawings in picture frames. A pencil drawing of Einstein is on top, a painting of the sunset over the ocean is on the bottom:

Oh yeah, and the cat's bed. She has a nice bed made of fuzzy Minkee fabric right in front of the window and she almost never leaves. I was a little bitter that her cat bed took up PRIME TABLE REAL ESTATE, but this way she doesn't even look twice at my fabric or projects, so I guess it's worth it. =) My mom made that little cat wall hanging for me, and it seemed appropriate to place it over Sarah's bed:

So, that's about it! One corner of my office has been freshly organized. I have a pretty sweet ironing board, too, I'll have to show off the rest of my office in a future post!

Tip - Business Cards

When I first started my business I printed all my cards at home trying to save money. Dumb idea. This is definitely one of those things you want to hire out! It cost me almost $20 to buy a pack of 200 blank business cards and I spent untold hours trying to get the dang paper to line up right in my printer, feeding each page in one at a time and so many times the stupid thing would shift in the printer and the design would spill over to the other cards, ruining the whole sheet. I think I got about 100 good cards out of the 200 card pack. Because of the finicky-ness of the process I couldn't have a card with a design that went all the way to the edge and it didn't look as professional as I wanted it to. And then someone recommended VistaPrint to me and I'm so happy I found them! It was very easy to load up my design, I paid a few dollars extra for an image on the back and it just cost a couple bucks to load up my design - and once you load up your design you can use it for any other product without paying each time. I got 1500 cards for $50! Doing it myself I was paying $0.20 per card (100 good cards for $20) plus endless frustrating hours, through VistaPrint I just spent a few minutes setting it up, got a great looking card and only paid about $0.03 per card! I didn't even have to pop the cards out of the sheet, leaving my cards with those annoying perforated edges. =)

Vista Print: www.VistaPrint.com.

A Business Is Born

People ask me all the time how I got started with my own business so here's the answer!

I've always loved sewing and I've always had a huge bag obsession. I loved bags so much but I could never find the right one for me. They were too big, or the wrong color, or didn't have pockets where I needed them or whatever and I soon realized the only way to get the "perfect bag" was to make it myself. I used patterns at first but even that had problems - what if I wanted it bigger or wider or just plain different? I started modifying patterns to suit me until I was comfortable enough with the essentials to be able to come up with my own patterns to suit my needs.

When my first child was born I made my own diaper bag and matching hand bag. I got some really pretty decorator fabrics - a deep red with gold dragonflies and a coordinating red and gold plaid - which, at $20/yard seemed like such an extravagance! I made my bags and used them everywhere. A friend of mine in my son's playgroup saw it and insisted on having one of her own. Which would have been great but I had no interest making bags for other people. I was busy enough with my baby, I had so many more bags I wanted to make for myself, I was worried she wouldn't like it and then what do you do, and I just didn't see how I could find the time to spend days making something for someone else.
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But she kept asking and asking and finally I broke down and said Fine. I'll make you a bag. So I did. And then another friend in playgroup saw hers and had to have one, then someone else saw hers and it kept going like that until I found myself reluctantly running a pseudo business that I didn't even really want!

Mostly I was just scared. I was worried that with a baby I wouldn't have enough time and energy to put into a business, I was nervous I would make a bag for someone and they wouldn't like it and I'd have wasted all that time and money and have the uncomfortable task of figuring out what to do next, what if my baby got sick and I wasn't able to finish something on time, and I had no idea how to organize an actual business - all the forms and organization that is needed for every single little thing. Ugh. I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean in a tiny raft.

I found out as I went along that my fears were mostly unjustified. I worked very hard perfecting each design before it was available to sell and people really seemed to like them. I got comments every time I carried one of my bags out in public and I never get tired of the gasps when I say I made it myself. I managed to figure out a schedule that allowed me to work while my baby was sleeping but didn't overwhelm me. And the business organization just came naturally. It helped that I started small, only taking orders when I had time for them and because I was making each bag separately as the orders came I didn't have to shell out a bunch of money for inventory to start up. Advertising wasn't an issue either - ever since I made that first bag almost four years ago I've had more orders than I can accept and it has all been through word of mouth.

It's not that it was all roses and I've certainly made my fair share of mistakes. I did things at first that took up too much time and energy - like making my own business cards trying to save money. Turns out it's cheaper and so much faster to have them made for you! And you don't have to deal with the aggravating task of feeding each piece of business card paper into the printer and cursing when it comes out crooked! The summer after I started my baby was a year old and I decided I could put more energy into my business since Jack didn't need quite so much attention from me anymore. So I booked myself up. Then Jack stopped taking his morning nap (cutting my sewing time in half) and I got pregnant with my second child which left me totally exhausted. Turns out it's a lot harder than I thought to be pregnant while running around after a toddler! I was embarrassed to have to tell people that I wouldn't be able to make their bag. For a long time I didn't have a place to keep my sewing supplies out, so sometimes during Jack's nap I would have just enough time to get out my machine, lay out my fabric and sit down before he would wake up and I'd have to put it all away again. I now have a portion of the living room blocked off for my sewing "office" which works out so well for us. I'm primarily a stay-at-home mom, so being able to work while watching my kids is essential. I'd love to have a little studio in the backyard, with a big window of the ocean, nice music playing, I think painted wooden floors would be nice and a cozy couch where I could nap while dreaming up my designs - but I live in the real world and the only place I'm going to get anything done is right in the middle of all the action. If I leave the house to check the mail my boys will find something to destroy.

So, in short, I just sort of fell into my business and it all grew organically by trial and error. Some things worked, some things didn't, sometimes it was exhausting and a lot of the time it was fun and exciting. Being paid to sew was just about the coolest thing I could imagine!

I'll go over a lot of the particular things that I learned and found helpful for me, but that's how Kate McFaul Designs was born!

And So It Begins...

In high school I sewed my first bag. It was a quilted shoulder bag for carrying books and it turned out quite nice - except the straps were flimsy and unpadded and cut into my shoulder every time I put, well, books in it. I also sewed my first outfit which was a pair of flannel shorts with an elastic waist and a (dreadful) matching top. Following a clothing pattern was confusing and frustrating and I had no idea what I was doing. I think I still have that outfit, but if I do, it's buried in a box somewhere in the garage. I made a huge pillow which became my dear old cat's favorite place to sleep and is now a big floor pillow for my boys to play on. I also learned to crochet in high school, and my first project was a little mouse hanging off a leaf for a friend. The first "mouse" was such a scary, mangled little thing it soon became a joke in my house. I put it in my mom's car when she wasn't looking and she quickly stuffed it in the glove box. Occasionally I'd pull it out and prop it up on the steering wheel, or sit it in her chair, or hang it from the rear view mirror and when Mom would get in the car she'd gasp and laugh and stick it back in the glove box. Poor deformed mouse.
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My first projects weren't great, some of them were downright scary and I didn't know what I was doing, but I was hooked. I had caught the crafty bug and there was nothing I could do but wallow in my wonderful illness and let it consume me.

My mom taught me to sew on her old Singer - one of those old black Singers with the gold trim from the 40's that go forwards and backwards and that's about it. My great-grandmother passed the machine down to my grandmother, who taught my mom to sew on it when she passed it down to her, who taught me to sew on it when she passed it down to me, and now I have passed it on to my three year old son Jack who has already sewn his first pillow and two little drawstring bags for his fabric and notions. Jack was so excited to learn how to sew, he hugged me and told me he loved me about every ten seconds while I was teaching him. I wish I had that effect on all my students! Or that he acted that way when I ask him to pick up his toys. "I'll just watch you clean, Mommy," is his usual response.

My projects got a little better throughout high school and I even made the dress I wore to graduation - a sleeveless yellow sun dress with darts and all. Mom even showed me how to finish the neckline with a bias strip of fabric. I didn't quite finish it though. You couldn't tell under my graduation gown, but I never got around to hemming the bottom...

In college I did anything crafty that I could afford with my limited budget. I bound books, did linoleum stamp carving, made mosaics, I crocheted a huge, intricate, fringed bedspread, learned to draw, did watercolor, acrylic painting, a little more sewing - really anything that looked interesting.

And so it began - my love affair with crafting. Painting glass, molding clay, making my own candles, soap and paper, knitting, felting, quilting, screen printing - I've even done some stained glass work. But my biggest passion will probably always be sewing. I make handbags, diaper bags, baby slings and have recently fallen in love with designing my own clothes. I've built myself quite a nice little sewing business, too.

This blog is meant as a record of my journey, to chronicle my many projects, to offer simple instructions on a variety of projects and to help people starting out see what goes into building a business. I hope you enjoy what follows!