Collectibles and More
- Consignment Sales
Photo Submitting Tips
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How well your consignment item shows itself to potential buyers,
will help determine if it will sell or not. Unlike a physical store
where customers can touch, feel and see all sides of collectibles
they are contemplating buying, on line, they have to rely on pictures
and written descriptions.
Here are some suggestions for submitting the best quality pictures.
You do not need top a high cost, high quality camera to take good
pictures but there are some minimum standards. Cell phones do
not make good cameras. I recommend that you use a real camera
to take pictures of your collectibles. Likewise, still photos made
from video cameras do not make good pictures. Good consumer grade
digital cameras with as few as four megapixels will do just fine.
There are some things you can do to insure that the pictures from
even simple cameras will be great.
Figure 1 |
I shot the picture in Figure 1 with a popular and
modestly priced consumer grade, compact automatic digital
camera. The type of camera that is small enough to fit in
a shirt pocket and has fully automatic settings including
auto focus and auto exposure. This type of camera is often
referred to as "point and shoot" and for this sort
of photography it is very capable. The picture is properly
lit (brightness in highlights and shadows) and in sharp focus.
After I loaded the picture into my computer from the camera
I did a little work on it in Adobe Photoshop.
You do not need to go to that effort. You do not need a complicated
and costly photo editing program for this purpose. In fact,
you don't need to do any editing at all on the picture before
you send it to me to use with your consignment listings. After
I receive the pictures, I will make small enhancements in
order to make them look as good as they can look. There are
no deep shadows which can hide detail or overblown highlights
(bright areas) which also obscure detail. I'll talk about
those aspects later.
The size of this picture is 500 pixels high. I need the pictures
received to be at least 600 pixels high. Preferably
bigger. Maybe 1000 or more pixels high. I sized this one to
only 500 pixels in order to minimize the loading for this
page. There is a point where the picture is too large. That
point is if the size of the picture file becomes much more
than one megabyte in size. We can certainly accept pictures
of that size and even larger, but there is no benefit and
on line transfer time by e-mail will be longer.
Be sure to set your camera to produce the highest quality
pictures and the largest image size. If you find that with
such settings you can only fit four or five pictures on your
camera memory card, then all I can say is you need a bigger
memory card. They're rather inexpensive. Besides, your family
holiday pictures and other pictures you will take will benefit
from the higher quality settings.
Depending on your camera, the picture coming out of it may
be quite large. Obviously the larger the picture, the longer
it will take to send by e-mail, if that is the method you
have chosen to send pictures to us. You may elect to size
the picture yourself before sending it. If you do, please
make sure that the size of the image is sufficient.
Note that the object in the page which is the music box itself
occupies almost all of the picture frame. The bigger the object
in the picture, the easier it will be for buyers to make out
all of the detail.
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You can crop the picture to remove much of the background or leave
it uncropped when you send it. Make sure that it is cropped BEFORE
it is sized.
Figure 2 |
The picture in Figure 2 is the same height as Figure
1. It was sized to 500 pixels high BEFORE any cropping
was done. So though the pictures are the same size (remember,
we need the pictures to be at least 600 pixels high), the
object of the picture, the music box itself, looks much smaller.
That is why the picture needs to be cropped to its desired
size BEFORE the size of it is set.
It is not important to fully understand the terms "cropping"
and "sizing". I am not attempting to make this page
a photography training course. My intent is to cover the basics
and show what we need for product photos submitted for listing
to look like.
If the picture size is large enough to start with (pixel
size) you do not need to do any more editing of it. Send it
as it is and I will take care of the editing. If you are familiar
with the technique and prefer to do that, that is ok as well.
What is so magical about the number "600" for the
picture size? Nothing. I selected that size as a good compromise
between having the product pictures be big enough to see the
detail and not be so big as to hinder quick opening in browsers
of site visitors who do not have high speed Internet access.
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One other thing while we are looking at Figure 2. Notice
the entire picture looks a little "blue"? I made it that
way to show another problem that sometimes occurs with pictures.
If the color in your picture turns out to be a little "off"
don't worry too much about it. Send it anyway. I can more often
than not work on the picture to help correct color problems. Not
always, but most of the time. The picture does not have to be perfect.
The idea is to make it so that a potential buyer can judge whether
or not he or she wants to buy it.
Next we will look at some common photographic problems to avoid
and I will offer some basic tips on how to avoid those problems.
Problems are easier to avoid than they are to fix once created.
There are simple steps we can take to avoid these problems. Some
problems can be fixed later. Others cannot so it is best to avoid
the problems if at all possible. To see more problems to avoid,
click on "Some Photography Problems to Avoid" below. If
you are interested in learning more about the art of photography
and to learn more about cameras and how to get the most from them
click on "Photography Question Page" below.
NEXT
- Some Photography Problems to Avoid
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