I’m on a journey at the moment to make print sales a larger part of my business model and I want to bring you guys on the journey with me. Last week I wrote about numbering print editions and this week I have a quick and simple tip that will spruce up your photography website and help customers imagine your images on their walls.
In researching how I wanted to tackle print sales, I must have been on over 50 websites from other photographers who also sell prints of their work. Whenever a photographer also had a physical gallery space, there was almost always photos of prints hanging in their gallery. I quickly noticed though that when a photographer doesn’t have a gallery, there was typically no attempt made to showcase their work in any way other than the online thumbnail gallery. In my (free) eBook; 10 Incredible Tools For Professional Photographers, one of the recommended tools was an iPad app called Shoot & Sell. This app allowed you to fairly quickly create illustrations of what prints would look like when hanging on a wall in a living room or bedroom. The app works fine, but the resulting images aren’t very high quality and the number of available ‘backdrops’ is a bit limited. These images weren’t going to do that job I wanted them to on my website where I wanted images of a specific look, in order to match the overall design of my site.
The solution was to first go to ShutterStock and purchase a 5-pack of image downloads (get 10% discount here). I then used these backgrounds and Photoshopped some selected images onto the walls. It’s a simple, but effective way to give people a bit of inspiration and get them imagining your work on their walls. Now most people offer prints in a variety of formats like canvas or gicleé and these might come with frames or they might not. I would recommend that you keep it simple, just as I did in the images you see below. I didn’t bother to add any frames in Photoshop and I don’t think that this has any really negative effect. In fact overall, I’m very pleased with how these quick mockups turned out.