Taking product photographs will do your business a lot of good, even you feel like you do not have much use for it right away, which is unlikely because mostly these everyone shares pictures through some medium. But this is not about a one time thing. Make taking picture a part of your work process and do it with the same due attention as you do all the other work.
Show Your Credentials And Crafting Skillset
I believe that good product photographs are really important. Photo albums are a great way to show a customer the kind of work you are capable of. Its like showing your credentials and skill set to someone. A word of caution here though.
Be careful while showing your pictures to new customers that you do not overwhelm them. Simply make the offer that incase they want to see some of the things you have made in the past, they can. And then let them go through the pictures at their own pace. Let them know that if they have any questions about a product they can ask you about it.
Serves as a design book
A photo album of your work also serves as a design book. The customer could be needing something like you have built in the past and going through an album might help them to order that.
You can consider creating different photo albums for the work that you have done and another of good designs and ideas which can be your own or drawn from another source. These design ideas are ones that you are ready to make on order.
Make it a classy affair.
I have seen many a photo album that make the wood project look pretty dowdy even though I know the it is pretty decent work. The most common problem is the light where everything seems to be bathed in an orange, red or yellow hue. Granted, not everyone knows about photography. So learn a few simple things like adjusting the white balance.
Another problem the I have come across is the cheap albums with bad cover design and reflective plastic sleeves. These do nothing to flatter the photographs in them. Avoid them all together, is my advice. There are many other ways of making an album.
Go digital.
This makes sense. You will be clicking pictures on a digital camera anyway. Buy an old model iPad online from someone you know and use it as an album for your work. The well lit high resolution screen of an iPad also makes pictures look good and visible under all kinds of lighting.You can keep making multiple albums in the iPad and have them all stored in this portable format. We want to emphasise that the quality of the photographs should be very good. If you do not have a decent camera, get one.
Nowadays a decently priced digital camera will do our good job for you. However the best results still come from a digital SLR. If you have a high quality camera phone, you can use it as well. But here’s the catch. Just because you think your phone camera is great, it doesn’t necessarily make it so. In fact very few phone cameras are that good and only the top of the line ones have a camera that you should consider using for your product pictures.
Even then there are niggling problems like most phone cameras will not give you any depth of field, which in layman terms means the ability to focus on the subject while blurring out the background. However, again, the top of the line cameras from such as the new iPhones have this ability.
We will cover product photography and how to take good pictures of your crafts in another section of this blog. That is an important topic as well. But for now remember this step. Avoiding using the built-in flash on the camera and use as much natural light as possible. The lighting in the room can also serve the purpose if it illuminates the product well.
Upload pictures to the cloud
Uploading your pictures to a cloud services like Dropbox and Picasa is also a great idea. Your photos become available everywhere and on all devices and you can share them with other people with ease. However, always have an off-line copy on your devices as well. You never know when the Internet connectivity might fail and leave you in a lurch at the crucial moment with a customer. Having online photo albums also enables you to share a particular picture or create a special album to share with someone simply by sending them a link. You do not need to send each one through messaging or email.
Usage for online store, social media, ad campaigns etc.
I studied this article with the statement that having a good product photographs serves many purposes. In this day and age you will probably make some effort to sell or at least promote your products online in some manner. For this you need product pictures. In fact, product pictures is the number one factor that determines sales online. Pictures are the only way that a potential customer is able to see the product.
By getting into the habit of taking product pictures right from the beginning you will ensure that you are ready you need to either starting your wood crafts online on your own website, your own online store or a 3rd party platform.
We wrote an article sometime back about the benefits of promoting your business through social media online. We also spoke about the ease with which you can have run ad campaigns online and reach millions of potential customers as far as you are wiling to sell your woodcrafts.
Sharing on social media is quick, simple and effective if you follow all the right steps. And the one thing that you are going to need in order to do this is good product photographs.
