A photo style sheet for a jewelry shop

The first session tends to look coherent whatever you do, because it was all photographed in one sitting. The same surface stayed on the table, the light stayed where it was put, and the camera was never moved far. Coherence came from the sitting, not from a decision.

Weeks later the same pieces have to be matched. Memory has kept the impression — pale surface, close in, plenty of light — and discarded the parameters that produced it. So the second session reconstructs the impression, and a reconstruction lands near the original rather than on it: a slightly different distance, a slightly higher viewpoint, a piece taking up a little more of the frame than before.

Nothing in the second batch is wrong on its own. Both batches are competent photographs. They simply do not describe the same shop, and a listing page shows them next to each other.

That is what a style sheet is for. It is not a statement of taste and it is not a mood description. It is an instruction addressed to someone who was not present when the look was settled, and it succeeds or fails on whether that person can act on it.

A line is usable when two things hold. Someone who was not there can follow it without asking a question, and a second person can look at the finished frame afterwards and say whether it was followed. Both tests, not one.

Adjectives fail both. Clean background gives nobody an action, and no two people will agree on whether a given frame achieved it. Bright is a comparison with something unnamed. Elegant, premium and consistent are descriptions of an intention, and an intention cannot be complied with.

Rewriting an adjective is mechanical once you see what it is hiding. Clean background is usually standing in for a specific object that happens to be in the room: a particular sheet of paper, a particular tile, kept in a particular place. Write the object down. Bright is usually standing in for a position — where the light sits relative to the piece, and where the piece sits relative to the window. Write the position down.

The first line is the surface, and it deserves to be named precisely rather than described. This site's guide to choosing a surface sets out why the surface is not scenery behind the piece but part of what the piece reflects, and why an upright shot involves a second surface that a flat one does not. The sheet does not repeat that reasoning. It records which actual object this shop uses, whether the arrangement is flat or upright, and where the object is kept between sessions.

After the surface, the entry that does the most work is the viewpoint: how high the camera sits and how far it stands from the piece. Both drift without anyone noticing, because both are set by a body rather than by a switch. The fix is to make them physical — a mark on the table for where the surface goes, a fixed position for the stand — so that the entry can be checked by looking at the room rather than by looking at the photograph.

The third entry is the one shops most often leave out, and it is the one that makes a grid of thumbnails read as a set: the share of the frame the piece occupies. Two frames shot on the same surface from the same height still look unrelated when one piece is small in the frame and the next fills it. This entry is written per category rather than per shop, because pieces are not the same size and pretending otherwise makes scale unreadable.

Some categories cannot take a single line at all. A chain has no resting shape, and one frame cannot carry both its length and its detail — the necklace guide sets out why. What follows for the sheet is not a loosening but a second line: this shop photographs a chain as a stated pair of frames, arranged a stated way, each at its own share of the frame.

On-model frames need a different kind of entry again. A pose is a setting and it drifts between sessions, which the guide to photographing on a real hand covers in full. The sheet cannot stop the drift; it can record the parts that hold still — which hand, which finger, where the wrist meets the edge of the frame, what the hand is resting on — so that what varies is the pose rather than the whole arrangement.

Frames that matched on the camera screen can stop matching by the time they reach a listing, because everything after the shutter is also a set of choices: the crop ratio, the exported size, the file format, the order the images are placed in and what each file is called.

Aspect ratio is the one with outside support. Shopify's media guidance recommends keeping the aspect ratio consistent across a collection, so this is not only a shop preference — it is a published recommendation from the platform, and it belongs on the sheet as a single named ratio rather than as a habit.

Format and size belong there too, with a caution about where the values come from. Shopify names PNG and JPEG as the best options and accepts other formats, and it publishes hard ceilings for file size and pixel dimensions along with a recommended size for square images. Those figures are deliberately not repeated here. Platforms revise them, and a number copied into a guide ages badly. Copy them onto your sheet from the current documentation, and write the date you copied them next to them, so the next person knows whether to check again.

Two smaller entries earn their place. File naming, because a set that is consistent in the frame and chaotic in the folder loses the consistency at upload. And retouching, written as a list of what may be removed rather than as an instruction to clean the frame up, so that no default step quietly deletes something a buyer was meant to see.