One of the biggest challenges of online retail in relation to brick-and-mortar stores is the customers can't handle the merchandise. Smart web retailers use detailed images to give buyers a chance to examine every feature of a product before purchase. Macro photography gives these pictures the crisp detail they need to make the sale.

Getting Close To The Merchandise

Customers often want more than just a description of a product before buying. We are a visual species and gain a great deal of information from what we can see. Some customers might want to verify an item's quality or imagine how easy it will be to use. Others are interested in appearance for its own sake, wanting to judge color or style to see if it will match their own aesthetic desires.

This is why pictures are so important to online shopping. Although descriptions are helpful, even the most evocative text can't give a shopper as much information as a high quality photograph. Everything from auto parts to diamond jewelry sells better if customers can get a clear image of what they are buying.

Bad Pictures Make Bad Impressions

Populating an online store with pictures isn't as simple as a few snaps with a cell phone camera. Images that are too small can frustrate shoppers by not giving enough information about the merchandise. Low resolution, blurry or poorly-lit pictures hurt sales by making the product appear cheap. Professional quality equipment and carefully planned layouts are keys to creating high impact online catalogs.

Catalog photos need to be arranged correctly to give maximum information. Ideally there should be multiple views of the product and zoomed-in views of important features. Close up photography presents the greatest challenge. Even expensive cameras have trouble focusing clearly on very small or very close objects, which is why most cameras have a special setting for macro photography.

Get All The Details With Macro Photography

Close up photography is difficult in normal mode. The camera focuses on a point but at such short range any detail even a small distance from the focal point becomes blurry. The region of sharp focus is called the depth of field, and it becomes smaller as the distance to the object becomes shorter.

Professional cameras, special lenses, and sophisticated focusing techniques, combined with high-tech computer image processing, can create images that have a wider depth of field and so are able to take critically focused images even at very short range. They can capture sharp details across the entire surface of an item, allowing shoppers to see every feature of a product. When combined with a high megapixel camera, the result is an image that is finely detailed even when zoomed in. Buyers can examine a product down to the tiniest feature, confident they are getting exactly what they want.

Give your customers the details they need by adding high quality macro photography to your online catalog