Product photos that sell, on the phone you already have
Stand outside any shop in New Road and look at the phones in people's hands. Half of them cost more than a secondhand DSLR, and every one has a camera good enough for online selling. Yet most shop pages still show a kurtha crumpled on a glass counter, half in tube light and half in shadow, with a calendar and a carton of straws in the background.
The gap between a product that sells online and one that just sits there is almost never the camera. It is three things: light, background, and doing the same thing every time. All three are free or nearly free, and all three fit inside a normal shop day.
The photo does the shop assistant's job
Inside the shop, you do the selling. You hold the shawl up to the light, you turn the ring so the stone catches, you let the customer feel the weight of the brass. Online, none of that exists. The photo is the whole conversation.
So think about what a bad photo actually says. A dim, tilted picture of a NPR 2,500 kurtha tells the customer this might be worth NPR 800, and that the shop might be equally careless about stitching and delivery. That is unfair to your product, but it is exactly how people read it. A clean photo does more than show the product. It tells the customer that someone careful is on the other end.
Window light beats any lamp you can buy
The best product light in Kathmandu is a big window with no direct sun coming through it. Morning is good, late afternoon is good, and an overcast day is a gift: the clouds turn the whole sky into a giant softbox, the kind studios pay serious money to imitate.
Set a small table beside the window, product on the table, window to one side of the product rather than behind it. Then do the one thing almost nobody does: switch off the tube light. Mixing window light with a fluorescent tube gives you two colours of light at once, the phone splits the difference, and everything comes out slightly green and slightly sad. One light source, always.
If hard sun does fall through the glass at your only free hour, hang a thin white cotton cloth over the window. It softens the shadows instantly.
One thing not to buy: a ring light. It is designed for faces on video calls, and on products it leaves a strange circular glare on anything shiny, which in a jewellery or electronics shop is everything.
A plain background for less than a plate of momo
Walk to Khichapokhari or your local fabric lane and buy a metre and a half of plain cloth, white or a very light grey, say NPR 250. Iron it, because wrinkles photograph like mountain ranges. Or buy white chart paper at NPR 30 a sheet, tape one end to the wall and curve it down onto the table so there is no visible corner behind the product. Photographers call that curve a sweep, and it is the entire secret of the floating-on-white look you see on the big shopping sites.
Then marry your background. One colour, for everything, forever. The moment one photo is on white, the next is on the counter, and the third is on your bike seat outside, the page stops looking like a shop and starts looking like a photo gallery.
Dark cloth can work for gold and brass, and Patan handicraft often sits beautifully on deep colours. Fine. But choose once and stay with it across the whole shelf.
One recipe for the whole shelf
Here is the part that separates a professional-looking page from a careless one, and it costs nothing: write down your recipe and repeat it.
- Same window, same rough time of day
- Same background, same table
- Same distance from the product, so every item looks the same size
- Same angle, straight on or a slight look-down, chosen once
- Same simple edit at the end
Tape the note to the wall beside your window table if you have to. When forty pieces of new stock land two weeks before Dashain and you are photographing between customers, the recipe is what saves you. You are not making forty decisions, you are following one.
Customers scan a product grid in a few seconds. They cannot tell you why one page feels trustworthy and another does not, but the answer is nearly always consistency. Twelve products shot twelve identical ways reads as a brand. Twelve products shot twelve different ways reads as somebody's camera roll.
Shoot for the grid, not the single photo
On almost every shop website, including the ten templates on Pasal, your photos will sit in a grid of squares or near-squares. So shoot with the crop in mind.
- Put the product in the centre and let it fill roughly three quarters of the frame, with a little air on all sides, so the crop never amputates a sleeve or a teapot handle.
- Wipe the lens on your shirt first. Pocket grease causes more blurry product photos than any camera fault.
- Tap the screen on the product to focus, and drag the little sun icon down a touch if the background is glaring.
- Never pinch to zoom. Phone zoom is mostly software and mostly mush. Step closer instead.
- Take five frames of each product and choose one later. Film is free now.
A few trade notes. For clothing: one photo flat or hung on the plain background, one close on the fabric weave. For food: shoot at a slight angle, close enough to see texture, and quickly, before the steam dies. For jewellery: get very close, steady the phone against a stack of books, and let the window do the work.
Edit like you salt dal
A little lifts everything, too much ruins the pot. Every phone gallery has an edit button, and you need exactly three moves: straighten the frame, raise the brightness slightly, and nudge the warmth if the photo looks blue or yellow next to the product in your hand.
No filters, ever. The customer who orders a maroon shawl and receives a red one blames you, not the filter. Colour honesty is not just good manners. It saves you the return, the refund argument, and the one star review.
An afternoon of work, then it is done
Be honest about the cost of all this: one window, NPR 300 of cloth or paper, and an afternoon. A shop with forty products, five frames each, is perhaps three hours of shooting between customers and one evening of choosing and light editing over tea.
This is the one part of an online shop nobody can do for you. On Pasal, the template handles the type, the spacing, and the layout of the grid, and the shop itself takes about five minutes to set up, but the photos inside that grid can only come from your counter. Put a consistent set in and even the plainest template looks like a proper brand. Put a messy set in and no template on earth can rescue it.
Shoot the recipe once, tape it to the wall, and every new arrival after this, festival stock included, drops into a grid that already looks like it belongs to a real business. When you are ready to see your shelf inside one, start at https://pasal.studio/start.