How to photograph what you sell

Your product looks better in your hand than it does on your phone. Most sellers conclude from this that they need a better camera. They don't. They need to move the table.

The whole method fits in a paragraph. Put the thing on a plain surface next to a window, switch every other light in the room off, and take six photographs: the whole product, the product with something for scale, a close-up of the material, the back or the inside, the product being used, and the group shot if you sell more than one. Then stop and go and do something else. A £600 camera photographs a kitchen ceiling bulb just as badly as a £120 phone does, and it costs five hundred pounds more to find that out.

This article is the long version of that paragraph, plus the parts that only show up after you've done it fifty times.

Six photographs, not sixty

The single most common failure isn't bad light. It's volume. A seller sets aside a Saturday, photographs nineteen products, gets four usable images per product, and then never opens the folder again because sorting through seventy-six photos is a worse job than taking them was.

Six per product. Decide the six before you start, shoot them in the same order every time, and the sorting takes forty seconds because you know what's what by position.

Shot	What it answers	Where the buyer looks
The whole thing, straight on	What is it	First, always
With something for scale	How big is it, really	Second, and they're anxious about it
Close on the material	Is it cheap	Third, if they're still interested
Back, base or inside	What are you hiding	Only the careful buyers, but those are your best buyers
In use, or in a hand	Does this belong in my life	Emotionally first, logically last
The group	What else do you make	On the way out, and this is where second orders come from

You can shoot all six in about four minutes once the light is set up. The setup is the slow part, which is why you set it up once and photograph everything you own.

One window is the entire lighting rig

Daylight from the side, coming across the product rather than from behind you, is what makes a photo look professional. Not brightness. Direction.

Stand so the window is to your left or right, put the product about half a metre from the glass, and shoot. The side facing the window is lit, the side away from it falls into shadow, and that gradient between the two is the thing your eye reads as "this object is solid and real". Light coming from directly behind the camera flattens everything and makes a product look like a photocopy of itself.

Turn the ceiling light off. This matters more than people believe. A warm bulb at 2700K mixed with cool daylight at 5500K produces a colour cast your phone cannot resolve, so it splits the difference and everything comes out slightly orange on one side and slightly blue on the other. You'll look at the result and think the product looks cheap without being able to say why.

Best window, best hour: a north-facing window in the northern hemisphere, any time between about 9am and 4pm on an overcast day. Overcast is not a compromise. A grey sky is a giant softbox and it's the light that professional food and product photographers pay a lot of money to fake.

Direct midday sun through glass is the one to avoid. It produces a hard black shadow with a sharp edge, and it blows out anything white. If that's all you've got, tape a sheet of baking paper or a white bedsheet over the window and the sun becomes a softbox.

The surface under the product matters more than the wall behind it

Nobody expects a backdrop. Everybody notices a bad table.

What works: a sheet of plain paper, a painted wall, a wooden board, a clean pale linen. What doesn't: a patterned tablecloth, a granite worktop, anything with a logo on it, and the stainless steel of a domestic kitchen, which reflects your face and the ceiling and every fingerprint you've left in the last week.

For most products, a large sheet of white or off-white card, curved up against the wall so there's no visible corner where the table meets it, costs about £3 and is the only prop you'll ever need. Roll it up between sessions. Replace it when it gets scuffed, because a scuff on the paper reads as a scuff on the product.

Colour choice is simple. Light products on a mid or dark surface, dark products on a light surface. A black bag on a black cloth is a rectangle. There's more on this, including when a coloured background genuinely helps and when it just dates your catalogue, in what a good product photo background looks like.

The shot almost nobody takes

Scale.

Ask any small seller which question they answer most often in DMs and it isn't price. It's "how big is it". A ring photographed alone is a ring. A ring on a finger is a size. A candle photographed alone is a candle. A candle next to a mug is 9cm tall and you've just deleted twelve messages you won't have to answer this month.

The trick is to use an object your buyer has definitely handled: a hand, a coin, a phone, a standard mug, a can. Not a novelty prop. Not a ruler, unless you're selling something technical, because a ruler in a photo says "measurement chart" and not "this fits in my hand".

And put the numbers in the text too. The photo does the feeling, the description does the certainty. That division of labour is the entire subject of writing product descriptions that sell, and it's the reason a great photo with a nine-word description still loses sales.

Colour is the thing you'll get complained about

There's an order of operations here that quietly costs people money, and it goes like this: seller photographs a mustard-yellow scarf, seller edits the photo on a phone with the saturation slider nudged up because it looks better on the small screen, buyer receives a scarf that is noticeably duller than the picture, buyer asks for a refund, seller pays return postage on a product that was fine.

Every saturation slider you touch is a return you're paying for later.

Get colour right at the point of capture instead:

1. Shoot next to the window with no other light source, so there's one colour temperature in the room.
2. Put something pure white in the frame for the first shot of each session. A sheet of printer paper works.
3. In editing, adjust white balance until that paper looks white, then apply the same adjustment to the rest of the set.
4. Leave saturation alone. Genuinely alone.

If your product's colour is its main selling point, say so in words as well: "mustard, closer to turmeric than to lemon". Words survive a badly calibrated screen. Photos don't.

Shoot everything in one session, in the same setup

This is the operational bit and it's worth more than any lighting advice.

Set up once. Photograph every product you sell, in the same spot, on the same surface, in the same light, in the same six-shot order. Then never move the setup until you've finished.

Two reasons. The first is speed: you'll do twenty products in ninety minutes rather than twenty afternoons. The second is that a catalogue photographed in one session looks like a catalogue, and a catalogue photographed over six months looks like a car boot sale. Consistency across the grid is the thing that makes a small shop look like a shop, and it's invisible until it's absent.

Mark the position. Chalk on the table, tape on the floor for where you stand, a note of which window and roughly what time. When you add a product in November, you want to reproduce the July setup, and you won't remember it.

What to do with difficult products

Shiny things. Metal, glass and glaze reflect everything, including you. Move back and zoom slightly, so you're not looming over the product. Shoot at an angle where the reflection is the window rather than the room. Jewellery has its own set of problems and its own fixes: how to photograph jewellery goes into the tricks for small, bright, reflective things.

Very small things. Most phones can't focus closer than about 8cm. Back off and crop rather than pushing the lens in until it goes soft. A crop from a sharp photo beats a full-frame blurry one every time.

White on white. A white candle on white paper disappears. Either change the surface to mid-grey, or accept the near-white and let the shadow define the edges, which needs harder side light than usual.

Clothes. Clothes are their own discipline, mostly because they have to hang or lie correctly before light matters at all. If you don't have a model and don't want to be in the photos yourself, the flat lay and hanger methods in photographing clothes without a model will get you further than any lighting change.

Food. Food goes cold, wilts and separates, so the order of operations is different: set up completely, then cook. What to photograph when you sell food covers the shortlist.

Products with options. If you sell one bag in five colours, you need five hero shots and one shared detail shot, not five complete sets. Which photos have to be per-variant and which can be shared is the practical half of how to handle sizes and variants.

Worked example: fourteen pounds, one window, Sheffield

Rachel makes soy candles in her spare room in Sheffield and sells them at £14 each, about 40 a month, mostly to people who found her on Instagram. Nine scents. Three tin sizes, so on paper that's 27 combinations, which is exactly the sort of number that makes people give up on photography entirely.

She doesn't shoot 27. She shoots this:

• One full six-shot set of the medium tin in the best-selling scent. Nine photographs including a couple of alternates, all on a sheet of off-white card by the front-room window on a Tuesday morning.
• One hero shot per scent, same setup, same distance, same crop. Nine more.
• One shot of the three tin sizes together, so size is answered once for everything.
• One shot of a candle next to a mug, for scale.
• One shot of a hand lifting the lid, for the material.

That's 21 photographs, two hours including setup and a coffee, and it covers a whole catalogue. Every scent has a hero. Everything else is shared. When she added a tenth scent in March, she got the card out, stood on her tape mark, and shot one photo that matched the rest of the grid.

Her costs: £3 for the card, £0 for the light, and one Tuesday. The photographs are now the second most valuable asset in her business after the customer list.

The candle sells for £14. If she took card payments on that, Sailo's fee would be 14p to 42p, which is not the number that matters. The number that matters is the rate: 3% on the free plan against 1% on Business, and at 40 orders a month she'd rather spend the difference on wax. She takes bank transfers and cash at markets, confirms them herself, and puts the money into stock. That's a completely reasonable way to run a shop, and it's covered properly in how to take payment as a small seller.

What "good enough" actually looks like

Good enough is not "professional". Good enough is:

• In focus at the point that matters.
• Bright enough that nobody has to guess at a colour.
• Cropped so the product fills most of the frame.
• Straight. Horizons level, vertical things vertical.
• Consistent with the other photos in your shop.

That's it. Five things, none of which cost money. Your phone will do all five, as long as you turn off the three settings that quietly wreck product shots; those, plus the editing steps worth doing and the ones that cost you refunds, are in taking product photos with just a phone. If you sell handmade goods, slightly imperfect photos of an obviously handmade thing often outperform studio work, because the studio look reads as "imported and resold" and the window look reads as "made by a person". Don't over-correct that into deliberate scruffiness, but don't chase a catalogue aesthetic you can't maintain either.

The one thing that genuinely reads as amateur, every time, in every market: a photo taken at night under a ceiling bulb. Nothing else on the list comes close.

The honest limitation

Photographs don't fix a shop that doesn't work. They also don't fix a price nobody will pay, and Sailo doesn't help you with either of those. It shows the images you upload and passes the order to whichever rail you've set up. That's the deal.

Worth knowing before you plan a big shoot: the free plan holds 10 products. If you photograph 40 things and then discover you can only list half of them without moving to Pro at $19 a month, you've wasted an afternoon. Count your products first, decide what's actually going in the shop, and photograph that. Most sellers should be listing fewer things than they think anyway.

And on a phone, all of this happens in a mobile browser, because there's no native Sailo app. Uploading twenty images over a weak connection is a slow, boring job. Do it sitting down, on wifi, in one go.

What to do next

Find the window. Right now, before you plan anything else. Walk around your home at whatever time you normally have free and look for the biggest window with no direct sun coming through it. That window and the table nearest it are your studio, and the decision takes ninety seconds.

Then pick your single best-selling product, shoot the six-shot set, and replace the photo currently on your shop. One product. Look at the difference before you commit a Saturday to the rest.

After that, the two jobs that most often outrank photography for a small shop: get the words right underneath the pictures, and get the price right in the first place. Start with how to price what you make if you've never worked out what an hour of your own time costs you, because a beautiful photograph of an underpriced product is just a faster way to lose money. And once the pictures and prices are settled, how to name your products is the twenty-minute job that makes a catalogue scannable. If the parcel is what worries you, the packing method that survives a real courier network is in packaging that survives the courier, and it starts with dropping a test parcel on your own floor.