Monday, September 21, 2009

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
Expand Post...