Nail photography for nail professionals is at best kinda fun and at worst a solid nightmare. You are supposed to grab a photo of nails when you’re in a hurry, all the while getting the perfect lighting and pose to make everything look great. Those Pinterest photos make it look so easy and, man, some of those Instagram photos are almost unreal in their perfection. While a lot of what makes some of the photos look great is some serious time spent editing and filtering, if you don’t have time for all that, use a few tricks to make it more likely you are starting with something that doesn’t need a ton of edit time.

This week, we’ve got a series of blog posts, enabling you to focus on one topic each day, rather than trying to remember everything all at once and making it even harder than it already seemed!

Nail Photography Day 1

What’s in a background? Sometimes so many things that we lose sight of the nails. Textured backgrounds like terry towels and super furry fabrics can make it difficult for the eye to focus on the nails. Try to choose a clean background. If your table is messy, showing it in the shot is not going to drum up future business like a clean, organized space would. If you want something fun and textured in the background, then use interesting paper to give yourself visual texture instead of physical texture.

There are lots of scrapbooking papers or glitter papers that give the illusion of texture while being a flat surface. A trick from #BFFmel is to take the same photo on a dark and light background. If you are using something like a step-and-repeat with your logo or hashtag, have one printed in black and one in white. If you are using another type of background, simply having a light and dark option, whatever the color may be, will completely change the look of the nails from dull to dazzling.

Try focusing on just the background of your images for one day and see how it changes things.