Photographing your art or craft work for sale

Selling your work online, getting your portfolio in front of the right people, or being chosen in an open call can be a fantastic way to get your name out there, but in every case you’re likely to need digital images of your work to show those people just what it is you do so well.

After spending all that time creating your work and getting it just right, it deserves to be photographed well. Unfortunately snapping an image on your phone won’t be good enough, and although you don’t need any fancy kit or lighting, you do need to spend a bit of time planning and getting things right.

Here are our top tips.

Hang/stage your work properly

If you’re photographing artwork hang it on a clean blank wall . Use a spirit level to align it and remove any distracting elements from around your work. If you’re photographing 3-D work, styling it properly is crucial, but so is a simple image without any other elements in it.

Lighting your work

Dimly-lit or overexposed shots of your work aren’t going to get you anywhere. You need crisp, clean images with colours that are true to life and have plenty of detail. If you don’t have access to studio lights, photographing your work outside on a cloudy day, or in shade on a sunny day (no one wants shadows across their work) is a good bet.

If you need to be indoors, move towards the window or invest in some ring lights, clamp lights or soft box lights (you can get two for less than £50 online) and it will make a huge difference to how your work looks.

If indoors, turn off your overhead lights. Tungsten, fluorescent and LED lights all produce different colour temperatures and although this can be adjusted in your camera or corrected in post production, the more you get right at the time you take your picture the better and easier it will be. Avoid using your flash, it will cause harsh shadows unless you bounce it off something else and control the light across your work.

If you have studio lights, or can borrow some, place two lights on either side of your work halfway between it and the camera. Angle the lights at 45 degrees and point them at the ceiling so the light bounces back onto your work instead of creating an overexposed hot spot. You can also make reflective panels out of white card, angle them at 45 degrees to the work to bounce light back into your work and distribute it evenly.

Position your camera

Position your camera directly in front of your work, pointing at the centre, so that it almost fills the frame. Make sure the work looks square around the edges – not distorted because the camera is at an angle. Make sure your focus is spot on and if you’re using your phone, turn on the gridlines to make sure everything is squared up.

If you have the option, set your camera to a low ISO (say ISO 100) to preserve detail and use your aperture to control depth of field. If necessary, you may need to put your camera on a tripod and use a slow shutter speed to facilitate this. If you don’t have a cable release/remote to set off your shutter, use the self-timer so you can step away from your camera and not create shake by pressing the shutter yourself.

Get the files sizes right

There’s nothing worse than a pixelated image on a website or submission so make sure your file size and resolution is appropriate to your medium. There’s no need for print size files online – they’ll just slow your page loading time – but it’s crucial that a potential customer can see the beauty of your work, its texture, true-to-life colours, and get a sense of scale and what it might look like in their homes.

Use multiple images

Having one great image of your work is good, but having more than one image is far better. Potential buyers want to know about colour, texture, scale and depth and one image can’t give them all that. Make sure you include an image of your piece on its own, in a domestic setting if that is where it is intended to end up, include a close-up detail to show texture and materials, and an image in a setting that offers something recognisable for scale.

Give it some sense of scale

Although you should always include dimensions in all your listings, numbers are fairly meaningless to a lot of people. A far simpler way of indicating the scale of your work is to include something in the image that is immediately recognisable in scale. For example, if you’re selling a cushion, include an image with it on a chair or sofa. If you’re a potter selling a vase, add one of your mugs beside it, and if you’re selling an artwork – display it above a sofa or armchair to give viewers a sense of its size.

Edit your images

Once you’ve taken your pictures make use of one of the many photo editing apps to correct any issues with exposure or white balance. Crop as necessary and optimise file sizes for the final output (print or web).

Use a tripod

Whether you’re taking pictures with your phone or a DSLR, a tripod will l help you to take far better photos. You can get tripods for your phone or a phone adaptor for a standard tripod quite cheaply – or you can borrow one from the technical store in the Richard Hamilton Building through the BookIt system. For high resolution images, using a DSLR will give far better results