Product Photography - Retiring my Cheapest Prop

I own a micro-business in the e-commerce sector, and one of my least favourite jobs is product photography. I'm lucky that a lot of our suppliers provide stock images, but just occasionally we get one that either doesn't, or provides images that the great god Google disapproves of.

That happened recently. A supplier updated their range of modelling paints, with a new formula and new packaging. But the only images they provided were colour swatches rather than pictures of the actual product.

The reason I'm not keen on doing my own photos is that I find it really hard to hold a phone or camera steady and take shots of a range that look consistent.

So for this one, I made an accessory.

All photos in this post taken by me

Yes, it's super primitive and made of carboard at a cost of exactly nothing 😁

But it meant that with a small mark to put the products on, I could take photos of over 100 different coloured bottles of paint that looked consistent.

All this does is hold the camera in a fixed place so I don't get blurry pictures if my hands shake.

For a background, I use a piece of white vinyl cut from a roll of the stuff that's normally used with a CNC cutter to make self-adhesive letters. The slightly rough matt finish is brilliant because it never gives glare or reflections, and when it gets dirty I just cut another piece from the roll.

Once the photos were taken, I cropped them manually in MS Paint (another primitive-but-just-works tool). The camera on my phone tends to take quite long and skinny pictures, which I need to crop to be square.

Then I resized them to a consistent size that works for images on my website. I've got an extension in Windows Explorer that I use for this; it's not installed as standard but easy to download (although I forget where I got it from !), and has the advantage that I can resize all the images as a batch.

The final step is that I upload all the images into Clipping Magic - yes, it's another simple "does what it says on the tin" tool which removes the background and leaves a clean product image in .png format. It's subscription based, but not expensive. I pay $7.99 a month for the pro level subscription, because at that level I can upload a whole bunch of photos and bulk clip them.

But having done all these photos, I've decided it's time to retire my trusty cardboard camera holder. It has established the principle that my product photos are better if it's not me holding the camera.

I picked up a cheap Instagrammer's camera holder with built-in light and desk clamp when I was on holiday in Spain (from Ale-Hop, of all places, for the princely sum of 15 Euro's). I've tested it, and it works very well. So the cardboard one is off to recycling-land.

Who knows, maybe one day I'll be packing orders and one of the boxes will contain a few recycled fibres of cardboard from it. If nothing else, it shows what can be done when you don't have a budget !