This lovely Recycled Bottle Cap Magnet was made by Trillium Artisan Becky Bilyeu, a low income crafter from Portland, Oregon who was a coffee shop owner for 8 years before she lost her lease and turned to us for help in growing a sustainable craft business.
As we are ramping up to be sellers on this exciting new marketplace, I just wanted to see if I could get some advice from other organizations who deal with artisan work. Specifically, how do you deal with the product photography?
There are about 30 more Recycled Bottle Cap Magnets in our store right now. Each one is a unique, one-of-a-kind work of art.
But I don't have photos of all 30 magnets, or of all 10 hats made by Kori from luxury fabric samples, or of all 12 tea cozies made from upcycled sweaters, or of all 25 pairs of unique earrings made from recycled glass scraps...
Because all of our items are made from recycled and reclaimed materials, no two are ever alike.
Right now we are in the process of trying to contract with a photographer to help us take care of our problem.
The way I see it, in order to be a good seller, we should be selling the customer EXACTLY what they see in the photo. So that means I must need photos of every single individual item we carry. If I list a Bottle Cap Magnet with a picture of a butterfly, and it sells, then I need to be ready to list a new one with a picture of a dog, or a flower, or a pumpkin...and so on.
Those of you who work with artisans and have similar situations of selling one-of-a-kind items, I would really love to hear from you about how you are solving the photography problem. Do you just list it and say, "Please note that no two items are alike and the exact color/pattern/image you receive may not be the same as you see in this photo?" - or do you photograph every single individual item to give the customer a fair representation of what it is they will be getting?
If you photograph every single item, do you hire someone to do it or do it yourself? How much does the photography cost you on average if you are using a contractor? Or how much time, if you are doing it in-house?
Thanks, I am really looking forward to hearing your suggestions on this.
Christine
Trillium Artisans
Any thoughts from the community on this question? I'd love to hear your ideas and suggestions.
Ok, the way to go depends on the size of your products. You may need different solutions for different size products.
Suggestions: order a catalog from http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ and buy a few general photography magazines. There are several off the shelf kits that you can buy that include lights and background. Which kits you use will depend a lot based on the size of your products. Start with a cheap but flexible one and the add on as you learn more.
A good tripod that can do boom if possible is a great investment, you can even make your own light boxes but will have a hard time replacing a good tripod.
Learn how to set exposure with you (preferable SLR) camera with a grey card.
Get good photo editing software, my favorite for this application would be Adobe Lightroom as you can link it right to your camera and create a series of presets that make everything go faster.
At Streetwires, our products are mostly handmade according to a sample 'prototype'. However, now that we are working more with repurposed materials - variations in colour do occur. With a product-range of our 4000 products, we have found it absoltely imperative to photograph and catalogue every single piece. It sounds like a lot of work, but we do it as each new sample is complete and we find it to be immensely useful. (As a record of how our design-skills and craft has evolved, and as an accessable reference as we often find we will get specific requests for products made years ago, and can therefore easily be replicated from the image if the sample has been sold.) We also keep records of the dimensions and weight - as this is valuable for remaking & for working out shipping-costs.
What works well for us is a middle-of-the-range SLR digital camera, and a light-table we made ourselves, fashioned from thin white perspex & lit from above.
We sell purses and bags made from vintage sari's. Because each is so different, we end up taking a picture of each and posting them. I made a light box and use photoshop. At first this was very labor intensive but your speed increases with practice. A possible suggestion for the bottle cap, take photos of each but rather than photoshop the entire thing, use a circle tool to cut out the middle and paste it into a template of the bottlecap. This could save quite a bit of time. For the hats you could take one picture of the general form, then take a swatch picture of the different types available, again this would save a lot of photo editing time.
Christine, Maybe I missed it but I didn't see what you're going to do with the photos. Website? Catalog? If it's a website you don't need or what high resolution.
For the World of Good site and for my regular eBay I have a Sony Mavica that takes directly to disk. If you have a newer computer that means an external disk drive is necessary. But they take great close-ups with adequate resolution for the web. I sell beads and get comments on my close-up photos.
I just plunk things down on a piece of plain paper and use indirect natural lighting. I use a program to crop them and sometimes I need to vary the color or brightness but usually it's just fine the way it is. And it's cheap!
Hope that helps a little.
Sharon
Matur Suksema
There's another idea you might want to consider: high resolution color scanning. We do that with each of the unique jewelry products made by our artisans and have found that, with slight adjustments via Photoshop or similar program at the time of scanning, the resulting images are quite serviceable for printing -- or, saved at a lower resolution, for the web. In fact, we often receive compliments on the images on our site.
We typically arrange the item on the scanner screen in an appropriate 'pose', cover with several layers of a neutral material (e.g., tulle) and then scan. 200-300 dpi for print purposes & then save the same image again at lower res for the web.