Friday, April 3, 2009

Taking good photos of your work


Myhandboundregistry recently featured a couple of photos of my books in an article on how to effectively crop photos of your work. I was really pleased, as I've worked hard over the last two years to improve my book photos, and apparently it actually paid off! :D

Etsy seller Doodlage, who wrote the article, is a graphic designer, and the article has some great tips on making your photos stand out. If you're looking for some photo help, the article is called "Who Made the Cut? Photo Cropping Tips From a Graphic Designer" and you can find it here.

To give you an idea of how my photos have evolved, below is one of the first photos I took of my books, and after that, a recent book photo.

As you can see, the this early one had it all: dark, harsh lighting, fuzzy, bad angle, bad cropping. Yikes!


This is a recent one. Still plenty of room for improvement, but getting better (I hope!). I used natural light, a more neutral background, and cropped the photo so you can see the details:



Here are links to a few more articles on taking good photos of your work. Some of them are for Etsy sellers, but the principles apply to any kind of smaller item photography:
http://www.etsywiki.com/index.php?title=Photographing_items#Photographing_small_items

And here are a couple of links to free photo editing software:

8 comments:

Kathleen Coy said...

Great post, good photos make such a difference!

Sam Marshall said...

Great info!

Anonymous said...

Your photos are very well done. I like to use GIMP imaging/editing software, opensource and free.

Waterrose said...

Thanks for the links. Your photos are looking beautiful!

Judith HeartSong said...

I think you take fantastic images of your books, and I can attest to the fact that they are every bit as beautiful when they arrive at your door!

Acornmoon said...

Thanks for the links, it all sounds like good advice.

moonandhare said...

Thanks for all your kind comments! :)

EJ said...

Your pictures are good, thanks for the link.