Photographing your stock with the phone you have

You do not need a camera. You do not need lights, a lightbox, a tripod, or an app with a monthly fee. You need a window, something plain to put things on, and about two hours. The phone in your pocket is a better camera than most catalogues were shot on twenty years ago.

Build the spot once

The single thing that makes a shop look put-together is that every photo matches. Same background, same distance, same light. That is much easier to achieve by not moving anything than by trying to remember what you did last time.

So set it up once, properly:

• One window. A window with daylight but no direct sun on the item. North-facing is the classic answer. If the sun is streaming in, hang a white sheet or a shower curtain over the glass and it becomes exactly the soft light you wanted.
• One background. A plain wall, a sheet, a bare tabletop, the back of a roll of kraft paper. Light and neutral is easiest to live with. It doesn’t have to be white.
• One distance. Stand where the item fills a comfortable part of the frame and mark where your feet go. Tape on the floor, a chair leg, whatever. Same spot every time.

Photos on Bluenose are square, and you frame them yourself when you upload. So leave a little room around the item when you shoot rather than filling the frame edge to edge. You can always crop in later. You cannot crop out.

Shoot the whole catalogue in one go

Once the spot exists, do the lot in one session. Forty photos taken in one afternoon at the same window will look like a considered collection. Forty photos taken over five weeks on five different windowsills will look like forty different shops, and no amount of fiddling afterwards fixes it.

Work in a rhythm: item down, two or three frames, item away, next one. Keep the phone at the same height. Resist the urge to get clever partway through, because clever is what breaks the matching.

Winter is the real constraint here

This is the part that is genuinely different in Nova Scotia. At the winter solstice Halifax gets under nine hours of daylight, and the useful, soft-through-a-window part of that is a good deal shorter still. By January the good light is a window in the middle of the day, and it closes while you’re doing something else.

The advice that follows is not “find good light.” It is: put it in the calendar. Pick a day, block the middle of it, and shoot everything. Treat a bright Tuesday in February as a production day the way you’d treat a market Saturday. If you make new stock through the winter, batch it up and do a session when you have six or eight new things waiting rather than chasing each one.

You can look up the sunset time for your own community if you want to be precise about it. Mostly you just need to accept that in December the window is early afternoon.

Plain background or in use?

You want both, and they do different jobs.

Plain background is the main photo. It shows the thing honestly: shape, colour, what you are actually buying. It is the one that stops an argument about what arrived.

In use answers the question a plain photo can’t: how big is it, and what does it look like in a real room. A bowl on a table with breakfast in it. Earrings on an ear. A scarf on a person. One of these per product is plenty, and a hand in the frame does more for scale than any measurement in the description.

If you only have time for one, take the plain one. Then add the in-use shot later for the things that sell.

The hard ones: jewellery, glass, anything shiny

This is where phones struggle, and where most people conclude they need equipment. They don’t. Shiny things are hard because a polished surface doesn’t show you itself, it shows you the room. Every reflection you dislike is something that’s actually there.

• Look at what’s reflected, not at the item. That dark smear is you. Move, wear something pale, or shoot from slightly off to one side.
• Make the reflection boring. A big soft window reflected in a glaze looks like a clean highlight. A ceiling light reflected in it looks like a hard white dot. This is the whole reason the window beats the lamp.
• Get the item off the flat surface. Stand a necklace against a folded cloth rather than laying it down. Lying flat, chains photograph as a tangle no matter what you do.
• Tap to focus, then tap the item again. Phones hunt on sparkle and will happily focus on the background behind a ring. Check the photo before you move on, at full size, not the thumbnail.
• For clear glass, put something behind it. Glass against a white wall disappears. Give it a slightly darker or textured background and suddenly it has edges.

Take more frames of these than of anything else. Shiny things have a good angle and several bad ones, and the only way to find the good one is to shoot ten and keep one.

That’s it

No editing, no filters, no colour grading. If a photo looks a bit dark, take it again nearer the window instead of trying to rescue it. The goal is that someone can see what they’re buying and that your shop looks like one shop. Both of those are achievable before lunch.