Photography

Talk to any Etsy seller and they will tell you that one of the most important things they can do for their shop - and also one of the most frustrating - is taking good pictures.  I have been using a white background for my photos thinking that it's a nice clean look.  Here's an example of a picture of a card on a white background:

As you can see, the background isn't a nice, bright white color; it's actually dingy looking.  To get a really clean, white background you need really bright sunshine or some good lamps.  Another thing that would help is some good photo editing software so that I could brighten up the background.  I use a free photo editing website called Picnic and the old adage "you get what you pay for" is certainly true.  It's better than nothing, but doesn't do all that I would like.

I recently tried taking pictures of cards on the same window sill I always use but without the white tagboard I usually use.  Instead I just set the card on the wooden sill and the pictures look like this:

It's much easier to brighten up the picture because the software isn't trying to decide what should be white.  I think the card actually shows up better, but I'm wondering if the wood is distracting.  I'd love to hear your thoughts - which background do you think shows off the card better?

Another trick I use when taking pictures is to use an item to prop up some items, such as tags as shown below:

Any idea what items I used to prop up these tags?  Duck calls.  Duh!