Great Tools for Staging Your eBay Photos

2 of 10 in Series: The Essentials of Preparing and Uploading Your eBay Images

When you take pictures of items that you sell on eBay, you want your merchandise to look its best. Fortunately, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to create high-quality photos. Using a photo cube and setting up a simple paper or fabric background are excellent ways to take great shots without breaking your bank account.

A photo cube allows you to take detailed photos of antiques and specialty items in your home. To work well wherever you use it, your kit should include two floodlights (which you can often pack up into a neat bag). The nylon cube diffuses the light so that there are no harsh shadows and you don’t burn out minute details with too much light.

You can find plenty of photo cubes on eBay at various prices.

The fine details in this antique ivory carving really show up due to the spectacular lighting diffused by the photo cube.

Backgrounds come in many shapes and sizes. You can get paper or fabric or use one of the portable photo stages for smallish items:

Seamless: In professional photo-talk, seamless is a large roll of 3-foot (and wider) paper that comes in various colors and is suspended and draped behind the model and over the floor. (Ever wonder why you never see the floor and wall come together in professional photos?) Photographers also drape the seamless over tabletop shots. Some people use fabrics such as muslin instead of seamless.
Fabrics: It’s best to use neutral fabrics (such as white, light gray, natural, and black) for photographing your merchandise so the color of the fabric doesn’t clash with or distract from your items. Some of the photo cubes on eBay come with great low-wrinkle fabric backgrounds as well.

Easy kitchen-counter eBay photography (just crop out the background).
Photo Stage: A photo stage is another valuable tool for taking pictures indoors or out. Textured ABS plastic is manufactured so you can set it in a curve shape (as shown here); the stage can be set on any surface and will permit you to take a clean picture without any extraneous backgrounds. You can store it flat on a bookshelf till you need it next.