Photographing Craft Work for an Online Shop

Daylight is the only light you need

Flash flattens everything that makes craft work worth buying. It kills the shadow that shows a bowl's curve, bleaches the depth out of a woven texture and turns a warm walnut rim a nasty shade of grey. Daylight does the opposite — gently wrapping around an object, letting small shadows sit in the crevices and revealing all the lovely irregularity of a handmade piece.

You don't need a studio. You need a window that never receives direct sun, which in the UK usually means a north-facing one. Set your work within about a metre of the glass. Any further away and the light falls off sharply, leaving you with muddy, underexposed shots. If the sun does break through, hang a diffuser between the window and your work — a sheet of baking parchment taped into a frame, a length of white cotton, even a spare pillowcase clipped to a clothes airer. The aim is soft, even, shadowless light on the object itself with a little gentle shading at the sides.

Turn off ceiling bulbs and desk lamps while you shoot. Mixing daylight with household lighting gives you two different colour casts in one frame, and no amount of editing will fully tidy that up. Bright overcast days are your best friend; mid-morning and mid-afternoon in summer are the hours to avoid.

Build a backdrop you can repeat

Consistency is what makes a shop look professional, and it starts with your surfaces. Choose two or three and use them relentlessly:

• A large sheet of white foam board, curved up against the wall at the back so there's no hard horizon line.
• A piece of grey or oatmeal linen, or a plain oiled wooden board, for warmer work like leather or wood.
• A slab of slate or a sheet of dark card to give pale ceramics, silver and paper their moment.

Add a second sheet of white foam board stood opposite the window as a reflector, propped against a stack of books. It bounces light back into the shadow side of your work and costs you nothing. Keep dust and fingerprints away with a lint roller and a soft brush — at close range, a single speck of clay dust looks like a boulder.

Lock down your settings and angles

A phone camera is perfectly capable of producing shop-ready images. Support it — a small tripod, a phone clamp, or a stack of books with the phone resting on top and a two-second timer so your hand isn't shaking the frame. Tap to focus, then drag the exposure slider down slightly so the whites stay white rather than blown. Turn gridlines on and clean the lens before every session.

Then shoot the same five frames for every single product:

• A straight-on front view, camera level with the middle of the object.
• A three-quarter view at roughly 45 degrees, which shows form and volume.
• A top-down flat lay for shape and pattern.
• A close-up of one making detail — a dovetail, a glaze pool, a stitch line, a hammer mark.
• A scale shot, which we'll come to shortly.

Keep the camera at the same distance for each angle across your whole range. It sounds fussy; it takes about ten extra seconds and it's the difference between a browsable shop and a jumble.

Make texture the star

Texture is what separates handmade from mass-produced, and it needs raking light to show itself. Instead of firing light straight at the surface, angle the object 20 to 30 degrees away from the window so the light skims across it. Flecks in stoneware, the nap of wool, the grain of oak and the tooth of handmade paper all appear as if by magic.

Glossy and glazed surfaces are the awkward ones, throwing hot white highlights everywhere. Nudge the object a few degrees, use your bounce card to soften the brightest patch, and underexpose by a third of a stop. Don't try to light the whole piece evenly — a little shadow is honest and more attractive than a flat, clinical look.

Show scale without clutter

Nobody can feel the weight of your work through a screen, so at least one image per listing has to answer "how big is it actually?". Hands work well if the nails are tidy and the pose is simple. Otherwise use something familiar and understated: a mug with a teaspoon beside it, a necklace laid over a plain white shirt, a brooch pinned to an offcut of wool, a bowl holding two lemons.

Skip coins and banknotes, which date fast and look transactional. Whatever you choose, keep it the same across the shop, and always write the dimensions in the product description as well. Photograph plus measurement is unbeatable.

Keep the whole shop looking like one shop

Edit lightly and identically. Straighten, crop to the same shape — square or 4:5 both work well — correct the white balance so your backdrop reads neutral, and lift contrast just enough to restore what the camera flattened. Resist heavy filters; buyers want to know what will actually arrive in the post.

Export at around 2000 pixels on the long edge in sRGB so the colours hold on every screen, and name your files consistently with the product name and view, which keeps things findable months later. Then batch your shooting: pick one day a month, set up once, and photograph everything that's ready. Your listing pages will look calmer, more trustworthy and far more like the work of someone who knows exactly what they're doing — because you do.