My good friend Shanna of Sitesquared wrote an awesome post about product photography and how important it is to the success of your website. And she was kind enough to let me share it here with my blog readers…

The presentation of your products, in most cases, will make or break your website. If you have some amazing product pictures, people will stick around and browse. Many times it will seal the deal. And, as I have mentioned before, you can have an amazingly designed website that will look mediocre if your product pictures are not so great.

Below we have a few examples of some amazing product photography. We made sure to choose from some of the amazing Boutique websites that Amy from Simply Creative and I have each designed. We hope you enjoy them!

Dabney Lee at Home
http://www.dabneyleeathome.com

Talk about amazing pictures. Creative positioning and excellent lighting. Absolutely wonderful presentation! These pictures certainly make you want to browse around and see what else she has to offer!

Crib Rock Couture
http://cribrockcouture.com

Tracy’s pictures are all very neat, clean, no distractions. Absolutely perfect for her website. Another excellent presentation.

Mama-La
http://www.mama-la.com

Amazing presentation here… another site with clean, neat pictures. (totally loving these stroller covers too!) The pictures are large enough to get a good feel for the products and complimentary to the site design.

Francie Pants
http://francie-pants.com

Here we have a website that sells the same product in several different colors/pattterns. They have a Virtual Dressing room using an illustrated girl to show you what the product looks like, then for the actual product photography, they have close up swatches. Perfect! You get a good look at the fabric choices and you can play a bit in the Virtual Dressing room if you want.

Urban Youngster
http://urbanyoungster.com

Check out these pictures! They have added a grungy urban frame around each of their pictures to match the look of their website! These pictures flow with the whole look and feel of their site.

Chatti Patti
http://chattipatti.com

A mixture of model shots and product only pictures here… perfect for her site. It’s nice sometimes to see clothing being worn if you have the right set up for pictures. All of these pictures are high key, using a pure white background. No shadows… the pics look awesome.

Oh Sew Adorable
http://www.ohsewadorable.com

Great model shots on this site! The kids are adorable, and you get a great feel for what you are buying.

Mamapatrice
http://mamapatrice.com

Talk about being transported into a Fairy Tale! Not only does Patrice make the most beautiful clothing, she also takes the most beautiful pictures. She spends a lot of time planning the picture, scene, etc around the outfit. Each picture makes you want to look at more!

Cherry on Top
http://cherrybows.com

Another excellent presentation. Crisp clean presentation of the products. Close up shots, so you know just what you are purchasing, and everything neatly displayed on their hang cards… great for branding!

Baby Petunia
http://babypetunia.com

The Baby Petunia team spends a lot of time making sure their pictures look good.

They stick with the clean white backgrounds for the most part as well. It really helps keep the site flowing!

Thanks for stopping by… hope you enjoyed the pictures.. pop by their websites to find some more great examples of excellent product photography. :)

Please join me in welcoming our first guest blogger, Shanna of Sitesquared.

OK, OK… maybe not the actual picture is worth $1,000. But, if a great picture helps you sell $1,000 in products, I would say it’s worth a lot. Pictures will make or break your website. Especially an ecommerce website. Just as if you were in a brick and mortar store, the presentation is key. Even more so on a website. The product picture is what will sell your product. I HIGHLY recommend having a professional take your pictures. Especially for high end items. You may even find an aspiring photographer at one of the local colleges or high schools to take some pictures for a decent price. (Yes, even the high schools have photography classes. I started taking classes in 10th grade… and we won’t mention how LONG ago that was.) However, if this is not an option, you can try these tips.

While I could go on forever, I have decided to treat this as a series. Today, I am going to run through a quick tutorial on how to take clothing pictures… with a little bonus ‘intro to Picnik‘. And, in the weeks to come, I will touch on how to snap some great shots of other kinds of products.

First, let me note, I do have a very nice DSLR camera, but all pictures for this tutorial were shot in the automatic mode. So, you can use your point and shoot camera and get the same results. So let’s begin already!

Step #1 – The Supplies

Make your way down to the local craft and hobby store and pick up a big piece of foam board (the kind used for school projects) and a couple of yards of felt. I used white felt today… however, you can use whatever color strikes your fancy… think about your website and what colors might look good with it. You should be able to walk out of the store spending no more than $10. Nifty, eh?

Step #2 – Iron Your Felt

Yes, I said that taboo word IRON!! I know, I don’t like to iron either. But the felt usually has a few fold lines from the craft store, and we need to take those out of the picture. (hehe)

Speaking of, let’s talk about felt for a minute. Why on earth am I suggesting you use felt? Well, there are a couple of reasons. The main reason is because the material in non reflective, so we won’t see any glare in our pictures. The secondary reason, the clothing will stick to the felt quite easily, so you can try out some neat arrangements with your clothing.

Step #3 – Pick Your Room and Your Lighting

You should pick a room with lots of windows. We want as much natural light pouring in as possible. The room I am using today has 5 large windows and it was a beautiful SUNNY day. So I had a lot of light in the room. I set up so that the product would be facing the windows. Start with a chair, and lean the piece of foam board against the back of the chair. I also used a piece of tape on the seat of the chair and the bottom of the foam board, so the foam board would stay put.

Next, we will drape the felt over the foam board. Today I am shooting kids clothing. If you need to shoot adult clothing, you may need something bigger than the foam board, and a couple more yards of felt.

Step #4 – Taking pictures!

So, it’s time to snap some pics. Position your clothing on the felt. Make sure that you iron the clothing if it has packaging creases from the manufacturer. We don’t want to see those fold marks. (Hey your iron is already out anyway… so you may as well keep going… and then you can come to my house and start on my… hehe) Try out some different arrangements. If you have several pairs of pants to sell, arrange some a different way to create a variety of pictures. When you are taking pictures, zoom right in on the item. This saves time when it comes to cropping.

Step #5 – Make Those Photos POP!

So now you have some decent photos! No half painted toenails in the corner of your picture… no carpet stains next to that shirt… and no clutter in the background. But, we are not done yet. Now we head on over to Picnik and punch up our pics a bit.. make them rock!

First, let’s brighten them up a hair.. use the Exposure tool. Don’t go overboard… we don’t want the color to get out of whack.

Next, let’s crop this picture. You won’t always need to crop, but in this case, I had a lot of extra whitespace.

OK.. almost done! Next, let’s add a border. This is not absolutely necessary.. however, if you are using white felt, I recommend it, simply b/c it will make the picture stand out a bit more… and as in this case, if the background is not pure white, it will be much less obvious. So head over to the Create tab and let’s add a border.

Lastly… let’s SAVE… yes, Picnik is amazing. They let you save your edited pictures on your hard drive. Woohoo!! So save away… and now you are ready to upload some kick butt product pics!

Next time, we’ll talk about taking model shots! Check back soon.