Product Photos With Nothing but a Phone and a Window

Photographs are the single biggest thing separating listings that sell from listings that scroll past, and the gap between the two is almost never equipment. It is daylight, a plain surface, and knowing which five pictures to take.

Light: one window, no flash

Photograph beside a window, in the morning or late afternoon, with the light coming from the side rather than behind you. Turn the flash off — it flattens the product and throws a hard shadow behind it. Turn the ceiling light off too if the daylight is decent; mixing a warm bulb with daylight is what makes colours come out wrong.

If the shadowed side is too dark, hold a sheet of white paper or a piece of white cloth on that side to bounce light back. That is a reflector, and it costs nothing.

Background: plain, and the same every time

A large sheet of white or light grey paper, curved up the wall so there is no visible corner line, is the whole set. A clean table against a plain wall works too. What does not work is a bedsheet with a pattern, a floor with tiles, or anything that makes the buyer's eye look at the room instead of the product.

Use the same background for your whole catalogue. A shop page where every photo shares one background looks organised and professional even when the products are ordinary.

The five photographs to take

1. The hero — the whole product, straight on, filling most of the frame.
2. An angle — three-quarter view, so the shape reads.
3. The detail — the texture, the port, the stitching, the thing a buyer would want to touch.
4. What is in the box — everything laid out together. This one prevents more messages than any other.
5. Scale — the product next to something familiar, or held in a hand. Size confusion is the most common returns reason there is.

Steady, close, and level

Brace your elbows on the table, tap to focus on the product, and use the grid to keep the phone level. Get closer rather than zooming — digital zoom throws away detail. Take more frames than you need; deleting is free.

Editing: crop, straighten, brighten, stop

Crop to a square, straighten the horizon, lift the brightness slightly and increase contrast a touch. Nothing else. Heavy filters and saturation boosts make the colour on screen disagree with the colour in the box, and that disagreement arrives back as a return and a two-star review.

Two things to avoid entirely

Do not use another shop's photographs — moderation checks for it and buyers recognise it. And do not photograph a different variant from the one you are selling. On a marketplace where reviews only come from delivered orders, the picture that oversold the product is the review that undersells your shop.

Photos ready? Open your free shop on Midmart and put them to work — there is no listing fee and no commission.