Photography for Websites

There are many, many websites where not having pictures is not an option. At the same time though, paying for photography for websites is not an option for a lot of people. I have found that while professional photographers work is fantastic – it's also expensive, and I'm a firm believer that a website needs to be fresh and often updated, and with that in mind, I can't be calling a photographer every week to do my bidding. So I learned how to do things myself.

Bad website photography is obvious and it's ugly, and you probably don't see it too often, because websites with bad photography are typically not very popular. Websites where there is product for sale are usually the worst culprit for bad website photography. Proper lighting and editing make things look bad.

If you want to get really in-depth, I recommend taking a look at this course: http://www.shortcourses.com/tabletop/

You will quickly notice that the above course calls for a lot of rather expensive equipment, which I don't have, so I simplified things. I have a regular point and shoot digital camera, and I use a free photo editing suite called GIMP, available here http://www.gimp.org/

In my mind there are 3 keys to good website photography:

Focus

A lot of photography for websites fails because the user of their camera does not know about something called macro mode. It's simply a mode on your digital camera (symbolized by a little flower) that allows for close focusing, anywhere from a few inches away from your subject to a foot away. This setting is great for product shots.

Background

In website photography, your background is key. To get a clean look to your website, the background of your subject should either be bright white, or otherwise very plain. On this website, you'll notice the banner/logo on top is a picture of yours truly at my office. Well actually, it's me at my house – I'm looking into a point and shoot digital camera, standing in front a white door. Then, using the 'foreground select tool' in GIMP, I was able to cut myself out of the me in front of the door picture, and paste it on top of this nice banner picture that came for free with my Joomla template from http://www.siteground.com

Easy as that, I have a custom banner image that looks pretty cool – and I didn't use any special lighting – just sunlight. I wore a black shirt to better contrast with the white door to make it easier for GIMP to know that I'm the foreground and I don't want the background. From there, I resized my image to fit the banner, and viola.

Lighting

Photography for websites does require good lighting. In all honesty, I tried taking the picture of myself at night first, just using my camera's flash – but, that created some pretty heavy shadows and I was not able to take a clean image off of the white door. I had to wait until the following afternoon when the sun came in nicely and the shadows were reduced to the point that I could easily crop myself out. If circumstances were different, I could have hauled a couple of work lights out of storage to eliminate shadows, but I knew my room and wasn't in a rush.

If you want to be a professional GIMPer, look no further than here: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/ they have a ton of great tutorials to get you even more advanced than I am at photography for websites.