Why the photograph is doing most of the selling

In a gallery, a buyer picks your bowl up, turns it over, feels the weight and holds it against their palm. Online, none of that happens. Your photographs have to answer the questions their hands would otherwise ask: how big is it, how heavy does it look, is the glaze glossy or dry, will it hold a decent brew. Clear, honest images do that work quietly and reliably. They also cut down on the messages and returns that come from a piece arriving "smaller than I imagined".

Start with soft, indirect daylight

Direct sun is your enemy. It throws hard shadows, blows out the highlights on a glossy glaze and turns a soft celadon into a glaring white smear. Work near a north-facing window, or shoot on an overcast day, or tape a sheet of tracing paper over a brighter window to diffuse the light. A cheap photography diffuser, or even a white shower curtain, does the same job.

Leave at least a metre between the pot and the glass so the light wraps gently around the form instead of hitting it like a spotlight. Late morning and mid-afternoon are usually kindest. Turn off any overhead tungsten light while you shoot and never mix it with daylight, or you will spend your evening chasing an orange cast that never quite disappears. Switch off the flash, clean the lens on your phone, and take your time.

Build a simple set-up you can repeat

You do not need a studio. You need a consistent one. Use a large sheet of cartridge paper, a roll of lining paper or a piece of matte fabric, and curve it from a vertical wall down onto the table so there is no visible horizon line behind the pot. This gentle sweep is the single biggest improvement most makers can make.

Choose the backdrop tone to suit the glaze. Pale cream and white glazes sit well on oatmeal, dove grey or a warm off-white. Dark tenmoku and iron-rich glazes need a lighter background so the rim reads as a shape rather than a silhouette. Avoid pure bright white paper, which makes stoneware look grey and clips your highlights, and avoid brightly coloured cloth, which bounces its colour onto the glaze.

Keep the surface itself matte. Glass, polished wood and shiny melamine all create distracting reflections. Props should suggest scale, not decorate: a linen cloth, a wooden board, a sprig of dried honesty. A modern phone on a small tripod is perfectly adequate, especially using the two-second timer to eliminate shake, tapping to focus on the front rim, and nudging the exposure down slightly so the brightest points on the glaze stay detailed.

Shoot the angles every listing needs

• Front on, with the lens level at the pot's mid-height rather than looking down at it.
• Three-quarter view, turned about forty-five degrees, to show the curve of the belly or the line of a handle.
• Straight profile, so the silhouette and proportions read clearly.
• From above, for bowls, mugs and vases, showing the interior and the rim.
• Close-ups of the rim, the foot ring, a handle join, and your potter's mark or stamp.
• Surface detail under raking light, with the light coming in low from one side to reveal glaze pooling, speckle, ribbing and throwing lines. Rotate the pot rather than moving the camera.
• In the hand, or beside a familiar object such as a teaspoon, to anchor the scale.

Shoot these in the same order for every piece. A repeated sequence across your shop feels calm and professional, and buyers learn what to expect.

Getting colour, scale and surface detail right

Colour is the thing buyers complain about most, and it is nearly always a white balance problem rather than a glaze problem. Put a grey card or a plain sheet of neutral grey paper in the first frame of each set, then use that frame to set the white balance in your editing app and apply it to the rest. Check the results on two screens, because phone displays run brighter and cooler than laptops.

Copper, red and orange glazes are the hardest to capture accurately and usually benefit from being desaturated very slightly. As for scale, state the dimensions in the listing and show them: a hand, a mug or a ruler in one frame saves a great deal of correspondence.

Finally, treat the surface honestly. For high-gloss glazes, angle the pot a little away from the window so you catch a soft reflection rather than a hotspot, and hold a piece of black card just outside the frame to kill glare if needed. Matt and satin glazes look flat in flat light, which is exactly when raking light earns its keep.

Keep editing minimal and consistent

Small corrections only: exposure, white balance, a touch of contrast, then crop. Do not over-sharpen, because glaze speckle quickly turns into digital noise, and do not crop so tightly that you lose the proportions of the piece. Export at around 2000 pixels on the long edge in sRGB, and name the files with the piece name and the view so you can find them again in six months.

Above all, shoot a whole batch in one session with the same set-up and the same light. Done that way, your shop grid reads as a considered collection rather than a jumble of one-off snapshots, and the pots themselves get to do what they have always done best: speak for themselves.