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Computer Times
August 2005

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eBay Photography the Smart Way

eBay Photography the Smart Way, Creating Great Product Pictures that Will Attract Higher Bids and Sell Your Items Faster, by Joseph T. Sinclair and Stanley Livingston, (2005: Paperback, 224 pages, ISBN 0-8144-7293-1, $19.95) gives readers easy-to-follow instructions for taking better pictures, helping them show off their products to the greatest possible effect. This is a book for beginners as well as accomplished photographers, providing the information you need to know to maximize your sales on eBay.

Perhaps the most important key to success for sellers on eBay is providing good photographs of their products. In eBay Photography the Smart Way, eBay expert Joseph Sinclair teams up with professional product photographer Stanley Livingston to pave the way for higher profits. The book shows you how to:

• shop for and buy a digital camera

• shoot any kind of product

• photograph and display entire product inventories

• create great thumbnails

• process photos with image editors

• use angles, lighting, studio props, and backgrounds

• organize process and work flow

On eBay, better pictures mean higher sales. eBay Photography the Smart Way reveals how to take great photos that give customers the confidence to buy online what they can't see in person.

I. Introduction [Editor's note: The full introduction is reprinted below.]
1. Overview of Photography for Product Sales
2. Equipment
3. Software

II. Photography Basics
4. Traditional Photography
5. Digital Photography

III. Product Photography Indoors
6. Indoor Basics
7. Small Items - Macro Photography
8. Tabletop Items
9. Large Items
10. Clothing
11. Glass
12. Graphics
13. Packaging

IV. Product Photography Outdoors
14. Indoor Photography Outdoors
15. Outdoor Items

V. Workflow for Digital Processing
16. Basic Processing
17. Batch Processing
18. Advanced Processing

VI. Using Your Photographs
19. Places on the Web
20. Building an Archive
21. Datafeed Marketing

VII. Strategies for Increasing Profits
22. Planning
23. Cost-Effectiveness
24. Enhanced Product Photography

Appendix 1 Top 10 Tips for Great Product Photography
Appendix 2 Useful Technical References
Appendix 3 Photographic Supplies Resource List

Good photographs sell items on eBay and help you maximize the sale prices of the items you sell on eBay. Poor photographs are a handicap to eBay sales. Average photographs will generate an average amount of interest for an item and consequently will not bring the maximum number of bidders or the maximum potential winning bid amount. Good photographs go a long way toward attracting a larger number of bidders and thus a higher winning bid amount. Great photographs often bring a winning bid amount that exceeds the expectations of the seller.

This is an encouraging concept, which starts the book off on a positive note. But let us (Stanley and Joe) use a depressing revelation to illustrate it: There are people who buy items that are accompanied by poor (or no) photographs on eBay, take good photographs of these items, and then resell the same items on eBay for a profit.

Joe knows a lady in the San Francisco Bay Area who operates this way. She buys poorly photographed designer clothes and accessories on eBay, cleans them up a little if necessary, photographs them carefully with a 4-Megapixel Sony Cybershot DSC-S85 (circa 2001), and resells them on eBay for a profit.

Of course, this isn't cost-effective with $5 items. It's much more likely to be successful with expensive items where the profits can be counted not in dollars, but in tens of dollars, or even hundreds or thousands of dollars. But any way you look at it, this seems to us a shocking practice, one that catches your attention. Don't let this happen to you.

This book will be the most valuable to sellers who are eBay retailers. Their eBay activities are substantial because selling on eBay is a serious sideline or a full-time career for them. If you fall in this category, you'll find this book helpful not only to take better photographs but also to process them efficiently. That is, you will learn how to take photographs faster and edit them faster so as to spend as little time as possible with this ongoing chore. With that in mind, we cover both camera work and post-processing work (image editing on a computer after a photograph is taken) in a digital image editor.

The camera features and equipment we recommend and cover in Chapter 2 are the minimum that you will need to get the job done well. That is not to say that you can't buy better equipment and spend a lot more money, but the camera equipment we recommend will enable you to take great eBay photographs for increased sales revenue. When we can recommend patching together a makeshift setup with household items or inexpensive items, we will do so. Where makeshift setups or equipment are not appropriate, we will recommend minimally expensive professional photographic equipment. Using the proper equipment to take great photographs is not difficult, but there is something to learn in order to do it well. This book covers what you need to know.

What do you have to have in the way of computer equipment? Not much. You can get by with almost any modern equipment purchased since the year 2000. That means a computer processor running at 800 megahertz (MHz) or faster and a monitor and color card that display true color (24-bit color). However, color processing sucks up a lot of computer capacity. The faster your computer runs, the faster you can get your work done. The processing for this book was done with a PC running at 2.6 gigahertz (GHz), certainly not the fastest available computer in early 2005, but nonetheless one that ran at a comfortable speed for processing color photographs. The color card ran at AGP 4X with 64 megabytes (MB) of memory. Again, not the state of the art in early 2005, but perfectly adequate nonetheless.

We recommend that if your current computer meets this lower threshold, you use what you have until such time you feel you need to purchase something more modern and faster. If you don't have a computer that meets this lower threshold of capability, purchase the fastest computer you can afford. Computers are commodity items today. Unless you want to buy the absolutely latest and fastest, you don't have to spend much money.

It's nice, of course, to use a good computer monitor since these are photographs we're talking about. Probably all good-quality CRT monitors (the big heavy ones) since 2000 are OK. If you use an LCD monitor (thin one), make sure it's a late model with a high contrast ratio (e.g., 500:1 +).

Chapter 3 will cover the software that you need to do the post processing for your photographs after you take them with a digital camera. Although there are many capable image editors now, we recommend the use of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0. Even if you start out using a free image editor downloaded from the Web such as IrfanView, or the one that came bundled with your digital camera, computer, or color card, you will want to think about eventually spending $80 for Photoshop Elements 3.0. The bottom line is that we are not talking about big bucks to put together a system that will create great eBay photographs for you. But you will have to spend some money to get set up properly.

Unfortunately for those of you who already know how to use a digital camera well, we do have to cover basic photography for those who are not so knowledgeable. In addition we will cover the following:

• Basic studio product photography

• Basic image editing

• Efficient workflow (from taking photographs of items with a digital camera to posting the photographs on eBay)

You will find that we narrow down exactly what product photography is. We claim expertise only in product photography and not in other fields of knowledge closely associated with product photography, such as advertising or art (see story below). So this book does not necessarily contain something for everyone. It contains only what is stated above, but covers each of those areas in a clear and complete manner.

We have designed this book to help you take photographs that will bring you the maximum sales prices on eBay without spending an undue amount of time or money on the process. Whether you take your eBay photographs yourself or have someone else do it, this book can help you save money and increase your income. It is not self-evident how to accomplish this. Different types of items require different approaches to photography, and we cover the basics that apply to a wide range of items.

But exactly what are we talking about? Art? Advertising? Clear and sharp photographs? All of these? Or something else? What is appropriate for selling items on eBay?

Art Colorshuffler, Director of Advertising at the Eatmore Waffle Iron Company, decided to create a photograph for a magazine advertisement directed at chefs working in restaurants that serve breakfast. He chose a tried and true means of advertising: Sex. He wanted a completely white background. The only colors in the photograph were to be an attractive woman in a white evening gown, a white vase filled with flowers, and the Model 510 waffle iron. He called Stanley to do the shoot (i.e., take the photograph).

What's Stanley's job? Stanley showed up with his camera equipment to take the photograph. When he did, Art directed the shoot. Art decided the placement and arrangement of the various elements of the photograph (flowers, woman, and waffle iron). Stanley took a photograph that was clear and sharp with no distractions (e.g., a white background with no unsightly shadows).

This is a simple story. Note that Stanley didn't dream up this ad. Art did. Note that Stanley didn't direct this shoot. Art did. Stanley simply took the photograph. He used his expertise to take a clear, sharp photograph of professional quality. This is the job of a product photographer.

There is a division of labor here. Art has three jobs at his small manufacturing company. He has to dream up ideas for ads that will sell waffle irons. He draws on his advertising and marketing expertise to do so. Once he decides on an idea, he draws on his artistic expertise to make the ad appealing. Finally, he used his management skills to direct the appropriate experts to create the ad. For this ad, Stanley is one of the experts that Art uses, and the other is a typographer who will do the attractive typesetting for the text in the ad.

How much time does it take Art to do his work? First, he has to decide what advertising approach to take. This is a thought process that might take minutes, hours, or days for any particular product. For an assortment of products, however, the average is more likely to be measured in days per product than minutes per product. In other words, for the average product, it takes Art many hours to decide on a sound advertising approach. In this case, the approach seems simple: Put an attractive woman in an ad, and you can sell anything.

But Art had to take into account a lot of factors such as:

• Who are the prospective buyers?

• How well does this approach fit the product?

• How will prospective buyers react to it?

• How does it fit with past and future advertising?

• How does it fit with the magazines in which the ad will appear?

• How easy will it be to create an ad with this approach?

• How cost-effective is it compared to other approaches?

• Will my boss like it?

These are the kinds of considerations that advertising agencies agonize over for days and weeks.

If the Eatmore Waffle Iron Company sold its products to consumers instead of chefs, this advertising approach might be disastrously inappropriate. A better approach might be to use a photograph of a homemaker in a kitchen with the Model 510 waffle iron on the kitchen counter.

Once the advertising approach is decided, Art has to create the image. How much time does it take Art to do this work? The creative process is usually a long one. Just like it takes an artist a while to dream up a beautiful artwork, it will take Art a while to work out in his imagination how the ad will look. Again, for the average product, it takes many hours to create an ad. This is the kind of project on which the art departments of advertising agencies spend considerable time.

Finally, Art has to arrange for the attractive woman (model), the vase and flowers, the waffle iron, and Stanley to show up in the same place at the same time to get the job done. This also takes time. Note that by the time this ad was finished, Art had devoted considerably more time to it than Stanley.

What's the moral of this story? This book can teach you how to take good photographs of products. But this book makes no serious attempt to teach you advertising or art. Those are completely separate fields of expertise about which many books have been written. These are endeavors that take a considerable amount of time. Indeed, as an eBay seller, you can't afford to take the time to create professional ads, even if you have the expertise to do a good job. You would never have time left to sell anything.

Having said that, we also should point out that there will be a few types of products for which you do need to take an advertising and artistic approach to your photography. We will show you how to accomplish this in Chapter 23 with shortcuts that will enable you to use outside expertise to do this work for you at little cost to you.

What should be your goals regarding eBay photography? What should be the goals of this book?

1. Your primary goal should be to take a clear, sharp photograph (or photographs) that fully displays an item. Therefore, the goal of this book is to help you take such photographs.
2. You also want to shoot your photographs cost-effectively, taking into consideration both time and money. Consequently, a second goal of this book is to help you establish an efficient workflow.
3. For certain items, you need to present photographs that have an advertising character. Although this is relevant to only a small percentage of the items sold on eBay, it is the goal of this book to give you helpful tips on how to do this at little cost.

Goals are dictated by purposes, so it makes sense to specify what purposes these goals serve.

The primary purpose of an eBay photograph is to enable a prospective buyer to easily make a detailed inspection of an item. Such an inspection is one of the best ways a prospective buyer has to evaluate an item. Therefore, make it easy for prospective buyers. Provide clear and sharp photographs of the items you sell.

Another purpose essential to eBay photography is to save you time, effort, and money in doing a necessary chore. You have other important things to do in running your eBay business. You need to spend time taking photographs of items, but you don't need to spend any more time than absolutely necessary. You need a workflow that's efficient; that is, one that provides the highest quality for the least time, effort, and resources.

Finally, you need to show items in a special setting (with an enhanced presentation) in certain limited situations because:

1. The alternative is showing an item in a setting that does not fully serve your sales objectives. For instance, a car is too large to shoot in your studio, so you are forced to shoot it outdoors. Better to make the background attractive and pleasant than to make it ugly and distracting.
2. The item is primarily one of visual appeal and requires a special presentation. For example, jewelry needs to be displayed with an elegant, non-distractive background in a way that shows its appealing qualities. Consequently, using a black velvet prop to display a necklace may work better than showing a necklace lying on a flat surface with a neutral background.
3. The item is one you sell in great volume, and you can afford to take the time to give it an advertising presentation. For instance, a vase might be displayed filled with flowers in an appealing home setting rather than sitting empty against a neutral background.

Of the over 25 million items for sale on eBay each week, items that need advertising presentations make up just a small percentage. Still, it's smart to take a little extra care with them when cost-effective.

Stanley Livingston has been a photographer in Ann Arbor, Michigan for over 40 years. He specializes in product and architectural photography shooting photographs of everything from scientific instruments and works of art to award-winning buildings. Joseph T. Sinclair is the author of five other eBay books, eight books about digital technology, and a long-time amateur photographer.

This book is not designed to make a great photographer out of you. It covers only the basics. But in covering the basics, it focuses on product photography, which is crucial to eBay retail success. It also covers the basics of efficient post-processing workflow, which is essential in keeping costs down and profits up. We don't expect to see your product photographs on the cover of consumer magazines-although that's not out of the question-but we do expect this book to enable you to do your eBay photography the smart way.

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