Taking product photos with the phone you already have

A buyer cannot pick the thing up. They cannot feel the fabric, check the size against their hand, or turn it over to see the back. The photo is doing all of that, and it is usually the reason someone buys or keeps scrolling.

Most sellers hear that and think they need a camera. You do not. The phone in your pocket is better than it needs to be. What a phone cannot fix is poor light, a busy background, and a set of photos that never answers what the buyer is actually asking.

Light: one window, and turn the ceiling light off

This is the whole thing. It matters more than the phone, the background, and anything you do afterwards.

Put the product on a table near a window, in the daytime, out of direct sun. Direct sun gives you hard shadows and blown out white patches. An overcast day is better than a bright one.

Turn the ceiling light off. Mixing daylight with a yellow bulb gives you a colour cast that is awkward to correct and makes the product look like a slightly different colour than it is. That is the kind of small wrongness a buyer notices when the parcel arrives.

If one side of the product is too dark, stand a piece of white paper or card on that side to bounce light back. That is what a reflector is, and a sheet of A4 does the job.

Background: plain, and the same every time

A plain wall, a sheet of paper, a wooden table. Nothing with a pattern, nothing with your kitchen in the corner.

Two reasons. The product is the only thing worth looking at, and anything else in the frame is competing with it. And when every listing in your shop uses the same surface, the shop starts to look like one shop rather than a folder of unrelated pictures. That consistency does more for how established you look than any logo.

The five shots that do the work

A listing allows five photos. That is enough, and it is enough on purpose: five considered shots beat twenty near identical ones.

• The whole thing. Straight on, filling most of the frame, nothing cropped off. This is the one people see first in a grid, so it has to read at thumbnail size.
• The material, close. Near enough to see the weave, the grain, the stitching, the finish. This is the shot that answers "is this cheap".
• Something for scale. A hand, a coin, a phone beside it. Measurements in the description are necessary and nobody pictures them properly. One photo does what three lines of dimensions cannot.
• In use, or worn. On a wrist, on a shelf, in a kitchen. It lets someone imagine owning it instead of studying it.
• What actually arrives. The item with its box, pouch or wrapping. This one quietly prevents complaints, because the buyer already knows what is coming.

Holding the phone

Shoot at the height of the product, not standing over it looking down. Looking down at a thing on a table makes it look smaller and further away than it is. Sit down, or put the phone on a stack of books.

Tap the screen on the product before you shoot, so the phone focuses and sets the brightness for the thing you are selling rather than the bright window behind it.

Take more than you need. Twenty photos cost nothing and you will throw most of them out.

Editing: brightness and crop, nothing else

Crop so the product fills the frame. Lift the brightness if it came out dark. Straighten it if it is leaning.

Stop there. Do not push the saturation, do not use a filter, do not change the colour. A photo that is more vivid than the product sells the first order and costs you the second, plus a return and a message you did not want to answer. Honest beats flattering, and over the length of a shop it is not close.

What you can ignore

• A light box. A window does the same job for nothing.
• A ring light. Built for faces, and it tends to flatten objects.
• A camera. Later, maybe, and probably never.
• A white background on everything. Clean and consistent matters. Pure white does not.
• Waiting until you can afford a photographer. The listing that is live today is earning. The one that is waiting is not.

Where to start

Take one product to a window tomorrow morning and shoot the five. It will take twenty minutes, and the second product will take ten, because the hard part is deciding where to put the table and you only decide that once.

If you are still working out what has to be in place before a shop can take an order, the photos are one item on a short list: what you actually need before you can take your first online order. The whole sequence is in how to start an online store in Malaysia, step by step.

Start your store at berkedai.com