Rob's Blog

I’ve spent most of the afternoon today listing items on eBay.

It’s a great idea getting a bit of cash for your unwanted junk (not that anything I sell is junk of course!), but it does take a surprisingly long time putting them up there (and then of course a long time packaging and posting them once they’re finished).

The part that can take the most effort is getting decent photos. There are so many items on eBay with crap photos, and I don’t want to do that. The main problems with other peoples pics that I want to avoid are:

Bad Lighting

There are so many listings on eBay that have really poor lighting, often to the extent you just can’t see what you are buying.

Out of Focus/blurry

A lot of this is also due to the bad lighting – exposure is so long that there is a lot of camera shake. It may also be that the camera doesn’t know what to focus on.

Glare from Flash

I have rarely seen a good photo on eBay that has been taken with Flash. A flash is great for lighting up a family snap, but it doesn’t show of a product well. Either there are strange shadows, or more often (because they’re normally close-ups) there is a lot of glare from the flash which ruins the photo.

Distracting Background

If I’m buying a product from you I don’t want to see a corner of your tatty sofa, or your messy kitchen table.

Hanging Clothing

It’s very hard to tell what an item of clothing is like when it’s on a hanger, or lying on a bed, especially in conjunction with all the above problems.

The method I used today worked quite well. Firstly I took advantage of the nice weather, and took the photos outside. This meant the items were lit nicely from lots of directions, and I didn’t need a flash.

Next I set up a dark blue fleece blanket on our decking, hung over a table lying on its side. I got rid of the creases and folds to give me a uniform backdrop. This of course was in a sunny place, with no odd shadows.

I set up my camera with a tripod. This probably wasn’t needed given the light levels, but in slightly lower light means you can get good photos without using the flash.

That was it really. Framing the well to show off the product well is important, but can also be helped by cropping.

For one item of clothing I get Abby to model (it was a maternity top so it was ideal), but a pair of trousers that don’t fit had to be hung from a hanger.

I’m no photography expert yet (as much as I’d like to be), but I think I got some pretty good results, which you can see when my listings start at 7:30 today (or I might post the pics here later). Certainly better than a badly lit, blurry, camera phone photo!

OK, so I messed yesterday, but this post is only a few hours late, and is about yesterday, so that counts.

It was a gorgeous day in York yesterday, so we wondered into town, did a very small amount of shopping (I bought a soft toy for our baby – going to be the first I give him/her), and generally enjoyed the weather.

After we had some Fish and Chips in Museum Gardens, I took some photos. The full album is here, and here are a few highlights:

On the downside, I’ve discovered that the spot I’m getting on my images isn’t on the lens, so must be somewhere in the camera – going to have to do some more playing!
(PS: I can’t get the styling of the photos right – never mind!)

Disclaimer: I went to university with Natalie who owns Photolate.com, and had a sneak preview, but this is still an honest review.

Photolate.com (short for Photo Manipulation) is a new service that offers professional photo retouching for your own photos. The homepage is bright and cheerful and clearly shows what they offer with the simple claim “We retouch everyday photos”. The three packages “Natural”, “Rejuvenate”, and “Party Glam” start at just £4 per photo (£5 for Party Glam) and are described well with plenty of “Before and After” examples. They also offer addons for just £1.50

All packages offer basics like red-eye removal, colour and exposure correction, and blemish removal, as well as many more. Add ons offer to change eye colour, straighten teeth, blur the background or a bespoke add on which lets you ask them to do anything (although I’m sure there are limits?)!

I decided to try the service out with a photo and Abby and I at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich last year. As you can see, in the original we both have redeye, I have spots, and I’m very red (click for larger).

To place an order you must first sign up for an account. This is a pretty easy pain-free process (although you have to wait for a confirmation email), and once you have signed in to you new account you need to upload your photos. When I placed my order this was through a standard upload form, but now it’s been replaced with a fancy flash multi-file upload thingy – it seems to work very nicely. The size limit (when I ordered) was 10MB, which should be no problem for most resolutions.

Once uploaded, you’re shown thumbnails of your photos. These aren’t very good quality, but they’re good enough to chose your photo. Select your photo and you’re given the choice of which package to apply to your picture. If you can’t remember which is which, a handy help popup is provided to remind you – with more examples. You can also add any of the addons to your order.

I went for the Natural Package, with a bespoke treatment to get rid of the bandages on my fingers.

From here it’s very much like any other online shop: add to basket and checkout. At the checkout there’s a handy ’special instructions’ box to tell them what you would or wouldn’t like retouching (this is where I specified I wanted the bandages removing). Payment is made through Paypal (which I don’t personally like, but it is widely trusted, and ideal for a startup such as this).

They claim to retouch your photos (all by a real person) within 48 hours. I had to wait longer than this, but when I chased it up I got a prompt reply saying she wasn’t happy with the results so had to get it re-done. Quality control is certainly a good reason for a delay, and I am pretty confident this is just a teething problem.

A short while later I got an email telling me my photo was ready (“You`ve been photolated!”). I logged in to my account and downloaded the photo from the “My Orders” page. They only store the finished products for 2 weeks, so you have to make sure you are able to “collect” your order within this time. The finished result is below (click for larger):

My first reaction was “That’s not been retouched”, but that’s the whole point of the natural package – a natural look! The red-eye has been removed (on both of us and the random guy behind). My complexion is much improved, and the overall colour balance is better. The bandages on my fingers have been expertly removed. I still look slightly red, but I’d been in the sun, and I would probably look too strange pale or artificially brown.

Technically, the photo was the same resolution (2MP – this was taken on my old camera), and the EXIF data had been retained. The image was actually less compressed, although obviously this wouldn’t ‘bring back’ information lost in my camera’s original compression.

Here are some before and after closeups at full resolution (click for larger):

Overall a pretty good service at an amazing price. A few teething problems but they’re improving bits all the time. I would highly recommend this service.

Photolate are currently offering a limited offer of a free retouched photo for a limited time only (not sure how long for), so you’ve got no excuse not to try them out (enter free0805R at the checkout).

I woke up on Easter morning to find a good covering of snow, which was a bit of a surprise! Unfortunately we had a bit of a lie-in, so a lot of it had melted by the time I got out to get some pics. There’s a few in my gallery though, including some of my faves:

According to an elderly couple, all 11 ducklings survived the snow.

I like this one, but it’s a shame the daffodils were dying!

This is my attempt at being arty on a walk on Easter Monday.

See the rest here.

I’ve bought myself a lovely new Nikon D40 DSLR camera – it arrived on Tuesday. Unfortunately I was tight and ordered a memory card from MyMemory, which is cheaper, but it takes longer to arrive. This means I can’t use it which is really annoying!

I’ll report more on it when I can actually play with it!

Update (11:14): The memory card has arrived, I’ve had a quick play, but I must resist otherwise my customers won’t be too happy!