5 Tips For Taking Better Pictures of Your Merchandise

Merchandise pictures are an essential tool in a retail store's overall marketing campaign. Store owners post them on social media, send them out in newsletter, mail advertisements, magazines and more. High-quality pictures will naturally encourage your target audience to make a purchase, but poor, low-quality pictures can have the opposite effect by discouraging sales.

Tip #1) Learn Your Camera

You can't expect to take professional-quality pictures of your merchandise without first learning and understanding your camera's functions. Unfortunately, it's not as easy pointing and clicking the button. In order to take truly remarkable pictures that convey all of the positive features of your merchandise, you must learn things like shutter focus, viewing angle, etc.

Before you begin photographing your store's merchandise, spend some time reading through the user manual for the camera. It's not a bad idea to perform some test photos to help you get used to it.

Tip #2) Backdrop

Have you thought about what type of backdrop (if any) will go behind your merchandise? Rather than leaving your store as the backdrop, consider setting up an actual picture backdrop that's white, green or some other solid color. Doing so brings more attention to the actual product by removing 'normal' background elements.

Tip #3) Natural Lighting

I can't stress enough the importance of using natural light for your merchandise pictures. Even if your camera has a flash, natural light offers better clarity while minimizing glare and reflection. So turn off the flash and set up additional light around your merchandise.

You can try using an additional floor lamp around your product, or you can set up an actual studio light kit.

Retail apparel store: photo by jheffryswid™ d e s i g n.

Tip #4) Close-Up

A fourth tip that's worth noting is to focus on close-up photos of your merchandise. There's certainly nothing wrong with experimenting with distance photos, but the bulk of your pictures should be close-ups. Doing so will highlight the small details and features of your product, which in turn translates into more sales. Just remember to set your camera to the close-up mode/function; otherwise, you'll lose some of the image quality during the process.

Tip #5) Editing

Last but not least, run your pictures through a photo editing program to perform some basic touch-ups and optimization. Whether it's removing glare, cropping unwanted objects out of view, rotating, etc., subtle editing procedures such as this can have a drastic impact on your merchandise photos.