The Art of the Marketing Photograph

Not being a photographer, I have spent all morning so far (about 5 hours) making beautiful photos of 8 things.  I wanted to put some new stuff in my online shop.  Yes, fine art takes time, and since I'm out of my element, I found it challenging.  However, I do have a new camera, which is awesome and has made it easier.  It has a nice long-life battery, too, considering the time I've had to spend making the photos just so.  Even then, I know my sister would have done so much of a better job!

  

What goes into this process, you ask?  First, you take about 20 photos of each thing.  This takes patience because you should do more than one click of the same exact photo.  Who knows whether one will be out of focus or have glare or whatever you might not notice till it gets on a bigger screen.

Next, after downloading them onto the computer, you sort through them using your picture viewer on a nice big (not camera-sized) screen.  Delete all the bad/out-of-focus/glarey/faded/messy-background ones.

Then (for me) open two Photoshop-like programs.  Photoshop is expensive so I use the free (Photoshop-made) tool, GIMP, and the Microsoft Office Paint program.  The first one can rotate photos by hundredths of degrees, I can adjust color balance, fix little details of the photo like dust specks or an out-of-place thread, and save it as about a million different kinds of files.  Paint does easy cropping and re-sizing.

Finally, I load them up into Etsy! Etsy's posting process has gotten easier over the last couple years, I'm glad to say, or maybe it is just that I've taken the right amount of time to finally get the hang of it so it doesn't take forever.  I'm exited to have 6 new items in my shop as of today.  Come on by to see more photos!