If you’ve ever taken a moment to browse through the listings of ebay items you’ll find that many of the accompanying photos you’ll find a multitude of seemingly amateur shots of the items for sale. From fuzzy close ups, to overexposed, washed out pictures to fascinating glimpses of people homes along with the items for sale. Many of those ebay photos perform the basics of showing you the actual item for sale. So listing a photograph on ebay is very important to potential bidders, it adds reassurance and legitimacy to the auction; they can see what they are bidding for.

But perhaps these quick ebay snapshots do a lot less in helping the item to reach its full potential bid price than it otherwise could have. What can be more alluring than to see the item you want, presented at its best! Here are a selection of tips on the setup to photograph your items, that require no special equipment, and no extra time, to help you take better product photos for your eBay items.

First, some tips on your photos:

Lighting

It’s always best to use natural lighting when taking your photos. The best time to do this is outside, on a light cloudy day. Avoid bright sun this can cast stark shadows, give exposure problems, and probably highlight the item not to its best. Avoid using flash.

Background

You want to find a background that suits the colour of the item, a black, white and neutral colours work best. You can use a bed sheet, towels or pieces of card as your background. You’ll want the background to cover the whole of your viewfinder frame, so take you time to set this up, the larger and more flexible the material, such as a sheet, the easier it is to make sure it covers the photographic area. Having your camera on a tripod will be the quickest solution for this, you can check that the background completely covers the area your photographing and it is much easier to switch taking photos of your different items for sale and keeping the camera where it is.

Reflectors

Depending the direction of where the main source of light is coming from, you may want to use a simple reflector to bounce back the light back onto the item. Note where the shadows are being cast and use a white sheet of paper on that side, tilt it up at 45 degrees a little, and this will really help to more evenly distribute light on the item, reducing shadows.

Placement and Props

You’ll want to place your item into the centre foreground of the photo. If you are photographing more than one item for an ebay listing you can place these additional pieces into the background, and square all your items up neatly in your viewfinder. Placing a cardboard box underneath your background covering will give you an additional raised platform on which to place these additional items onto.

You can also add some props, perhaps to show how the item is used, or to add a finishing touch and a little interest to the picture, such as a small bunch of flowers. Remember though that if you are photographing props that feature heavily in the picture or performing a function, showing how the item works (perhaps a roll of film loaded in a camera for example) do state in the written part of the listing that they are only for illustration and not include in the sale!

Next weeks article will take you through those simple camera functions to photograph your ebay items easily, and let you in on a special way to list extra photographs without paying additional costs!