Photographing Your Cards Part 3 – All About the Angles!

Posted on by Stefanie
I’m back with another in my series of how to take better photos of your cards. I spent 10 years as a professional photographer and work with other peoples’ photos on a regular basis as I host tutorial bundles, blog hops, and virtual swaps regularly. While I don’t think all my photos are always perfect, I have a lot of tricks to share that will hopefully help you take better photos of your projects! Don’t forget to check out my original post, and the second in this series, and read on for one of my biggest tips yet…
I’ve had lots of questions about my set up, and to be honest it changes all the time. This set up here is my most recent one, and it works well for me because it’s right on my table as I’m creating, so it’s easy to snap some photos when I’m done.

You can see I have a “sweep” background that is a seamless piece of foam covered in a vinyl cabinet liner. My lights are an over head ring light which I move forward from the project I’m capturing so that the light is even and mostly from the top/front, and then a smaller ringlight as a “kicker” to fill in some of the shadows.
The first photo I wanted to show you is one I took from fairly close to the card and fairly square on to the card. Here I’m about a foot or less away from my actual card. To help you visualize what I’m talking about in this article, I’ve outlined the card in blue and it’s this shape that we’re going to be talking about.

This is not a “bad” photo. The card is pretty much square and everything is even. You can see a little bit of distortion because the top of the card is slightly closer to the camera, so that edge is longer than the bottom edge, but it’s subtle and not obtrusive. From this angle I moved my camera slightly so that I wasn’t straight on so that I can show some of the layers and texture in the card.

NOW you can see the problem right? The shape of the card is totally distorted and skewed. This is not a very flattering angle, and nothing ‘makes sense’ in a spatial way in the photo. Because photographs don’t show 3D space, you have to think of the flat shapes your images are creating. So how do we fix this?
My go to line for better photos of anything is step back and zoom in. For this particular photo I stepped back about three feet, and zoomed in on my camera (using the optical zoom NOT the digital zoom which is just cropping).

This photo is much more visually appealing! While it’s not as perfectly square as the first one was, there’s far less distortion and the whole photo just ‘works’ better. Now when we change the angle, this is where the magic happens!

From this angle we can see the texture and dimension we want to show off, and it’s not ‘just’ a flat photo of a square card, but we aren’t distorting the card as much. The shape is still skewed, but it’s even and ‘makes sense’ to the eye, so it looks much more appealing. Here’s another look at a more extreme angle.

So you see, you CAN take photos at an angle and make them work without massively distorting your project! Just step back and zoom in!
This applies to flat lay projects as well. Here’s a flat lay card where I photographed it from close up…

Not only is my lighting uneven in these because my camera cast shadows when it came between the light source and the project, but you can see how the project gets distorted in share with even just a small change in angle. Now to back up and zoom in….

Light with the standing photo, the angled photo is still distorted but because the distortion is more symmetrical, it’s more appealing.

I hope you learned something from these examples! Let me know if you have any questions, and feel free to join us over on the Crafty Collaborations Facebook group later this week for more talk about project photography, including a chance to post your photos and have them critiqued!

Anytime you place an order in my online store and use the host code on the right, you will also get a free mail & make class automatically mailed to you! Just place your order with the host code on your right, then join us for the Facebook live near the end of the month on my Facebook group “Creating with The Crafty Medic” where you can also take part in regular creative challenges, complete with prizes!

4 thoughts on “Photographing Your Cards Part 3 – All About the Angles!”

  2. I've done some Googling and understand that my phone doesn't have an optical zoom, just a digital one – but like you, I'd rather get my photos right 'in camera' with minimal editing afterwards. In that case, would you recommend stepping back and then cropping the image with editing software when I watermark it?

    1. You can do either, but I would seriously consider using (or getting) an actual camera that does have an optical zoom, your photos will be much higher quality.

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