Product Photography

Toy Car

I guess the next step in photographing close up is product photography consequently the ad in the sidebar. With the Internet having an international audience I am surprised more businesses do not trade on line. I guess there are a couple of problems first how do you get all your products photographed then load them to the Internet on a website? There is great opportunity for photographers in this area and one of the most important tools I guess as photographers we already have, the camera.

Most computers will have the ability to create a website using notepad or similar program on Mac, to write the HTML and CSS code. Special software such as Photoshop maybe required to save images to view on the web, a process that reduces the file size of the image however, takes very little away from the image quality.  Why worry about file size? How many times when you are browsing the Internet and a site takes too long to load, do you immediately click back and go to the next site on the search engines list? That is the difference the file size makes, the images will load faster.

Alternatively there is some great Open Source software such as Gimp, which will do much the same as Photoshop and costs nothing. Before spending exuberant amounts of money on software, it is best to see if there is an Open Source equivalent. Furthermore the most popular software for loading site content to a server would have to be FileZilla an Open Source program. Hosting, having a server host the site is reasonably cheap this is a cost however that would be passed on to the person requiring the site, in addition to the cost of the domain name, the name of the site. I registered petersproductphotography.com for $15 American. A site I have setup to do Product Photography in my local area of Sydney, the Bankstown, Liverpool and Fairfield area.

Watch Outs.

Problems I have encountered creating websites for other people.

They have a couple of thousand business cards made up with a website address they have not registered; only to find the domain name is already taken by someone else.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Creating a site for business partners can be a total nightmare, with one partner wanting a dark colour and the other wanting a light colour. Where possible design a site following one persons requests, not more than one it is just too difficult. Additionally accept one partner will never be happy with the site.

Web design can be a challenging area; I have a blog called Ardan’s Blog Talk, which deals with some of the design deficiencies of blogs, and general information about web design. Furthermore if you need help there are some great forums on the web where people are generally friendly and are quite willing to help. Alternatively post a comment here or contact me and I will see if I can help.