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How to photograph art prints

You don't need a studio. You need to understand that it's two photos, not one — and to know the mistake that makes an in-situ shot useless, which almost everyone makes.

Two photos per piece, doing different jobs

The flat shot — the work cut out on a neutral ground — answers "what is it". The in-situ shot — hanging above furniture — answers "how much space does it take". With only the first, your customer has no scale reference, and that's where size returns begin.

The flat shot: even light and nothing else

• Window light on an overcast day. It's the best and it's free. Direct sun gives you hot spots and hard shadows.
• The work square to the camera. If the phone is tilted, the sides come out as a trapezoid. Camera dead centre to the print.
• No glass. Shoot the print before framing. Glass reflects the whole room.
• Plain white or off-white ground. A sheet of foam board from a stationer does it.

Then the part that really matters: make the photo's colour the paper's colour. Shoot the printed piece next to a sheet of white paper, and in editing adjust until that sheet reads white. It's a homemade white balance and it beats any filter.

The in-situ shot: the one that sells the size

You don't need a studio. You need a recognisable size reference: a sofa, a console, a door, a chair. Without one, the in-situ shot is useless because there's still no scale.

And if you sell several sizes of the same work, the trap: don't reuse one in-situ shot for all of them. Either shoot one per size, or the customer sees the same apparent size for the A4 and for the metre.

Mockups: when yes and when no

A mockup template — the work dropped digitally into a catalogue room — is fast and cheap, and has two problems. One, fifty other stores use the same room. Two, and worse, it almost never respects real scale: the piece is fitted to the template's gap, not to the size you sold.

As a starting stopgap they're fine. As your only visual asset, they end up costing you in returns.

The one that can't get scale wrong

No photograph, however good, shows the work on their wall. Augmented reality does: the customer points their phone and sees it hanging at real size, in the frame you'll ship. It's the only image with no scale problem, because the scale comes from their own room.