Taking Great Pictures - Photo Makeover Series

This is the first in a series of Etsy Photo Makeover discussions. Contributed by: Charmed by Karen

Essential to appearing in treasuries, appearing on the front page of Etsy and, ultimately, to selling our products are great photos. Photos can be our greatest online sales tool and the key to great photos is an inquisitive mind. There is so very much to learn about photographing for Etsy sales and all of us are continually learning. I'm not a photo expert, just another Etsy shop owner who has a lousy camera with which I am determined to make due. I am convinced that all of us can create beautiful photos with mediocre cameras and no fancy light sources or contraptions. Natural light is your best friend here on Etsy. It's all a matter of learning about your camera, setting a beautiful & intriguing stage and having fun in photo editing. Taking photos for Etsy is different than taking photos for other venues. There is an art, a style and even a science to taking successful Etsy photos. This ETTEAM Photo Makeover series is an opportunity for all Etsy sellers to learn more about creating photos that are appealing to treasury curators and buyers. Any and all comments are welcome.

Our first makeover is Midnightcoiler. She had been displaying and photographing the thumbnail (first photos) in her "3 medallions" series flat on the ground, separately arranged and shot from the top. While this thumbnail shot gave some good visual information, it didn't have much of a "clickablitiy" factor.

The thumbnail/first photo, which appears in the search pages, serves primarily to draw the shopper off of the search and into your store. The thumbnail need not convey anything more about an item other than the feeling that something wonderful awaits the buyer after the click. Photos 2,3,4 and 5 are informational in nature, but your thumbnail should always be inviting and intriguing. It doesn't necessarily have to be a close-up. Anything goes, as long as the photo invites the buyer to click, to step into your shop.

For a new, fresh approach, we changed Lynn's arrangement to give it some depth and to highlight the texture of her medallions. Arranging the medallions in a scattered pile gave them a more natural, inviting feel - almost as if the viewer had found them on a mountain path and was free to just scoop one up. She re-shot her new grouping lower to the ground and more from the side, to give the picture more texture and movement. We cropped the photos to feature each medallion and chose to center this thumbnail shot on the circle medallion because it was the most comfortable shape for the eye to focus on at first. The subsequent photos give more information, but our thumbnail is our "glamour shot," whose purpose is to attract, attract, attract. We finally showed the group as a whole. This is the "strip tease" method of presenting items. We show the parts, little by little, gradually revealing the "full monty" at the end. Voila!

Here is the new listing, along with the "before" photo in the fifth position:

About the author: Karen's fabulous Etsy shop is Charmed by Karen