Whatever camera you have, get to know its settings, and NEVER, and I mean NEVER, use flash. Flash creates glare and hot spots, and makes it virtually impossible to get the colors correct.
My point and shoot is a Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W330. I use 2 settings for product photography. The one I use the most is "ISO-high sensitivity". On your camera look for a similar setting that is high sensitivity, blur reducing, with no flash. Combined with a light box, this setting should take high-quality pictures for most of your items. However, when I need to get a good close up or am taking pictures of very small items, the "gourmet" setting works best. Every camera has a similar setting, one made for close-up shots. Often it has a picture of a flower next to it. On my particular camera these are all in the menu button under scene selection.
Most point and shoots do not have a way to control this, but another thing to be aware of is depth of field. This basically is what parts of the photo are being focused on and what parts are being blurred (see photos below for example). On my camera, when I depress the shutter button, a green box comes up showing where the camera is going to focus. My camera automatically focuses on what part of the photos it thinks is most "important". If your camera has this feature, great! Just be aware of it so the most logical parts of your item are in focus. With my camera, if I do not like what area it is focusing on, I can change my angle slightly and it will focus on a different spot. Again, learn about your particular camera to find out how its focusing works!
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Here are photos to demonstrate how important depth of field and focus are. In the one above, the focus was on
the chain, blurring the most important part of the photo, the pendant.
In the photo below, the focus is on the pendant, creating a much
clearer and more interesting photo. Do you see the difference?
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Another thing on your camera you should be aware of is white balance. Getting the right white balance setting will get you the most true to life colors as possible and reduce editing time. My camera has a good auto white balance setting (also under the menu section), but I know this because I tried all the other settings. The best thing you can do to learn your camera's settings and find which ones work best for you is to do trial and error. Take pictures of the same object with each setting to see what each one does with color, light, blur, etc, and take notes. Until you get to know your camera you will take many, many bad photos. Don't be satisfied with blurry (even a little!) photos or ones where the colors are way off. This is too hard or impossible to fix with editing software and misrepresents your item to potential buyers. And while it is best to get your photos as close to perfect as possible right away, if your photos are a little dark, are not cropped correctly, are slightly too red or blue, seem flat or don't have enough contrast, don't worry. This can all be fixed in the editing process. I almost always end up tweaking the contrast and brightness as well as cropping my photos in editing.
Getting to know your camera is just one part of taking great product pictures, but is not good enough on its own. Look for my other tips on how to make a light box, how to set up your "photo studio", and how to edit pictures in Picasa, coming soon!
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