A large part of selling jewelry online involves having awesome jewelry product photos. When people buy jewelry from the internet, they need to have a clear picture of what they’re getting. When taking cell phone photography, there are some key tips to help you take awesome jewelry product photos.

Focus Your Cell Phone Camera

Before you start taking jewelry product photos, learn how to focus your cell phone camera.  Most smartphones will either auto-focus when still for a few seconds. or require you to tap the screen a few times to focus on a specific area. It can help to purchase a separate macro lens made specifically for cell phone photography. This is true of most smaller objects, including jewelry.

Use a Cell Phone Photography Tripod

Using a tripod will help prevent issues that occur with shaky hands or focusing properly. It can also help you to use your cell phone camera at various angles, no matter how awkward. You can easily use an inexpensive tripod for jewelry photos. However, if you will be taking photos in which your jewelry is positioned up high or in places where you would need more than the usual small cell phone photography tripod. Tripods are great for taking timed photos to reduce the effects of shaking and other motion.

Lighting is Key for Awesome Jewelry Product Photos

Take awesome jewelry product photos by paying close attention to the lighting. For most jewelry photos, the lighting needs to be soft but not dim. This is why many jewelry product photos are taken outside. This is great when cell phone photography is the method you choose. Cell phones typically take the best photos outdoors. If you cannot take photos outside, you may also wish to try using a lightbox. For either method, try turning the flash off on your cell phone. This is because the flash can cause glare in jewelry product photos.

Edit Your Cell Phone Photos with a Good Photo Editing App

You shouldn’t have to do too much to your jewelry product photos, if you take them right. However, a little bit of touch-up editing can give you really awesome jewelry product photos. For instance, if you need the background completely white and there are non-white areas, you can solve this with a photo editor. You can also sharpen images or make certain areas stand out more than others.

You really can take awesome jewelry product photos with a cell phone. All it takes is a few simple techniques. Remember that to sell your jewelry online, you really need to show it off. The best way to do so is to showcase it with great photos. Try out a few of these techniques today and see how much more often people purchase jewelry products.

by Susan Darling, Contributing Writer

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when they use Instagram to promote their companies is posting the wrong types of photos.  This also applies to anyone who wants to share their arts and crafts on Instagram.

Sure a professional photo shoot can be a great way to promote a business, but if you really want to get at the heart of the subject, the photo shouldn’t be too posed.  While large companies and corporations can use this tactic, not everyone has a global following so it’s important to speak to your target audience through your photos. 

How do you know what to post and how to post it? Should you tag your photos? There are so many questions so let’s explore a few options.

Below are some tips for posting photos on Instagram that your followers will like.

Post Photos That Don’t Advertise 

While you may feel that it’s a waste of time to post any photos that aren’t advertising your brand on your Instagram, this can actually be defeatist for you.  There are so many different types of visual advertisements that your company has that it can be very difficult to not post them, right?  You’ll lose followers very quickly if you are not looking at the big picture.  People don’t want to be blasted with advertisements all the time.  Give them photos that are more natural, and whatever you do leave the informational graphics (infographics) to other social media sites.  They simply are not right for Instagram and people tend to ignore those types of photos anyway so it’s really a waste of your time.

Use Your Account 

So you’ve signed up for an Instagram account for your company but you’re not even posting any photos.  Your customers and business contacts will forget about your account if you don’t post regularly to let them know you’re still around.  It can also make your profile and your company seem like it lacks motivation because you’re not doing anything with the account.  Now, if you’ve really made an attempt to use Instagram at its fullest and you still aren’t into it, then you should deactivate your account rather than leaving it to rot in Instagram purgatory. 

Be Careful About Posting the Same Photos to Other Social Media Sites 

Yes, Instagram makes it very easy to save you time by allowing you to post the same photo to all of your social media sites.  That’s one of the benefits you heard about when you signed up, right?  However, while you can certainly post a few top photos or competitions to all the sites, you don’t want to have every single photo posted on all your accounts.  Chances are that your followers on Twitter and your fans on Facebook are also following you on Instagram.  They’ve now seen the same photo on three different networks and if you have more accounts then they’re being flooded with the same picture.  Try to mix it up and make separate posts to keep your company’s brand interesting. You can also pay for instagram followers but remember that this will just increase your numbers, not your activity.

So you’re not a huge corporation and you don’t need to post photos taken by a top of the line photographer with professional models to sell your brand?  Instead, offer photos that show your products being used organically.  If you don’t plan on using Instagram because it really doesn’t fit your marketing strategies then deactivate your account rather than letting it sit.  Finally, there’s no need to upload the same photo to every single site. Instead show a little diversity and post different pictures to different sites.

Author Bio:

Susan Darling loves Instagram and writing tips and hints to help others learn how to get the most from using it for business or for pleasure. She posts photos of nature scenes and flowers and also has an IG account for her business.