How to photograph pottery for your shop and Instagram

To photograph pottery, put the piece near a window with soft side light, on a plain gray or soft-colored backdrop, with a white card to fill shadows and a black card to move the window’s reflection off the glaze. Set color with a gray card. Shoot the front, profile, inside, foot and mark, plus one hand shot for size.

The rest of this guide covers what makes pottery harder to sell from photos than most products, then turns one shoot into weeks of Instagram posts.

Why pottery is harder to photograph than most products

Most guides on photographing ceramics cover the backdrop and the light, like the Tuts+ one-light tutorial. The Institute of Making’s workshop with the potter Darren Ellis asked participants to bring natural light, a fairly plain background and a few props, and welcomed any phone. If you sell your own pots, the photo has a harder job:

• The glaze is a mirror. Glossy surfaces show your window, your lamp and you.
• The color is the product. A buyer picks a celadon for its exact green. If the photo is off, you get a disappointed message, or a return.
• No two pieces are the same. A glaze breaks, pools and speckles differently in every firing. Your photo has to promise only what you can deliver.
• Buyers turn pots over. In person, people look inside, run a finger around the lip and check the bottom. Online, your photos have to do that for them.

Set up once and leave it

One fixed setup does more for your photos than any camera.

• Light from the side. Indirect window light, not a sunbeam. If the sun comes in, tape tracing paper or a thin white sheet over the glass. The Tuts+ tutorial makes the key point about soft light: “The closer the light is to the subject, the larger and softer the light will be.” For pottery, that means the bigger and closer the light, the softer the reflection in the glaze.
• A sweep, not a wall. Curve a sheet of paper from the table up the wall, so there’s no line behind the pot. Tuts+ suggests gray paper with little texture, not so smooth that it shines. In a Topaz Labs forum thread about a black etched pot, one reply pointed out that white can add unwanted reflections and that a soft color may be a better backdrop.
• A white card and a black card. White foam board opposite the window lifts the shadow side. A black card is your tool for glaze, as you’ll see below.
• A tripod or a stack of books. The same height and distance for every piece makes a shop page look like one collection.
• A shadow under the foot. A soft shadow where the pot meets the table gives it weight. Tuts+ puts the light above the piece for this reason.

Glossy glaze: the window in your mug

Look at the glaze on your screen, not the pot. A glossy mug shows a bright rectangle (your window) and, often, a dark shape in the middle (you and your phone).

How to fix it:

1. Move the reflection, don’t kill it. A thin, soft highlight down one side tells the buyer “glossy”. Turn the pot until the window sits near an edge, not across the decoration.
2. Make the light bigger. Tracing paper a foot from the pot turns a hard window shape into a soft band.
3. Use the black card. Hold it just out of frame. It replaces a bright streak with a clean dark line that draws the curve of the form.
4. Step back and zoom. Shoot from a few feet away with the 1x or 2x lens. Your reflection shrinks and the lip stays true. Close up with the wide lens, rims bulge and handles stretch.
5. Try a polarizer for flat glare. In the same Topaz thread, another reply recommended a polarizer for reflective surfaces. Clip-on phone polarizers exist. They work best on glare from flatter areas, like a plate or the side of a wide bowl.

Matte and unglazed clay need the opposite: low side light that rakes across the surface and shows throwing lines and carving.

Glaze color that matches what arrives

Color is where pottery photos most often break trust, so give it its own step.

Set white balance from a gray card. Put a gray card (or a white card) in the first frame of every session, where the pot will sit. Tuts+ recommends a custom white balance set from a gray card. On a phone, you can do the same in editing: use the white balance picker on the card, then copy that edit to every photo from the session.

Shoot in the same light every time. Window light shifts through the day and with the weather. A glaze shot at noon and the same glaze shot at 4 PM can look like two colors. Pick a time and keep it.

Check against the real pot. Before you upload, hold the piece next to your screen in daylight. If the photo is greener, bluer or brighter than the pot, fix the photo. Don’t push saturation to make a glaze “pop”: the buyer gets the real one.

Say what varies, and show it. “Each piece varies” is true, but it doesn’t help a buyer. Say what varies for this glaze, in plain words: “The blue breaks to brown on the rim and pools darker inside, more on some pieces than others.” Then show it. For repeat designs, add one photo of three pieces from the same firing side by side, so the buyer sees the range, not just your best one. For one-of-a-kind pieces, photograph the exact piece and say so in the listing.

The shots buyers ask for: inside, foot, mark and size

Each shot below answers a question a buyer would ask if they could pick the piece up.

A size reference without a ruler. A ruler looks like a lab report. A hand is the best scale, because everyone knows its size. Then put the real numbers in your listing text: height, width at the widest point and, for mugs and bowls, capacity measured with water up to where someone would actually fill it.

The bottom carries information. The foot shows the clay body and how carefully the piece was finished. If a piece is decorative only, show that too. The FDA’s questions and answers on lead-glazed pottery notes that pottery made only for decoration may have a warning stamped on the clay bottom, such as “Not for Food Use”, and tells consumers not to use such items for food or drinks.

Silhouettes: handles and lips against a plain background

A pot’s character is in its outline: the belly, the lip, the handle. That only reads against a plain background, at eye level.

• Pick the backdrop for contrast. A pale glaze on mid-gray, a dark glaze on light gray, so even a black pot keeps a readable outline.
• Show the gap in the handle. Turn the mug until you can see the background through the handle. That hole is what makes a handle look like a handle in a small photo.
• Keep the lip level. Line the rim up with the camera at its middle height, or slightly above. Shot from too high, every mug looks like a bowl.
• Nothing behind the outline. Props go beside the pot, never behind its edge, so the silhouette stays clean.

Turn one shoot into Instagram posts

Instagram moved the profile grid from squares to rectangles in January 2025: Engadget reported that Adam Mosseri tied the change to most uploads now being vertical. In May 2025, Instagram added 3:4 photos, which Mosseri described, according to PetaPixel, as “the format that almost every phone camera defaults to”. Our guide to the Instagram new grid size explains where the grid crop falls.

For pottery, that means:

• Shoot vertically, with room on every side. A tall vase fits a 3:4 frame well. A wide bowl doesn’t. Leave space around wide pieces so you can crop to 4:5 or 3:4 without cutting the rim or the handle.
• Make each carousel one piece. A carousel of the same pot works like the shot list above: front, profile, inside, foot and mark, in the hand, then the range photo. PetaPixel quotes a user asking for mixed shapes within one carousel, because today all the images share one. Crop the whole set to the same shape before you post.
• Alternate on the grid. Mix glossy heroes with a glaze close-up, a hand shot, a stack of bowls, a shelf after a firing. The free Instagram grid preview shows how a set of photos looks cropped the way your profile shows them. If your grid already looks like several shops, The 15-minute grid fix has quick fixes.

For what to post between pottery photos, the Etsy shop post ideas page has ideas that fit makers who sell on Etsy or their own store. The free product caption generator gives you first drafts to edit in your own words.

A one-hour shoot after a kiln opening

1. Minutes 0 to 10: set up and test. Sweep, cards, tripod. One frame with the gray card. Check the glaze for the window.
2. Minutes 10 to 35: the hero and profile of every piece. Don’t move the tripod. Swap pots only.
3. Minutes 35 to 50: details. Inside, foot, mark and hand shots for each piece.
4. Minutes 50 to 60: range and grid shots. Three pieces from the same glaze side by side, a stack, the shelf.

Keep the best two frames per shot. For marketplace listings, see product photography for Etsy. If you also make soap or candles, see soap product photography and candle product photography.

Once the photos exist, posting them is the chore. Season (in early access, not launched yet) is built for that part: for a store on Etsy or another marketplace, you paste your Instagram @ and add your product photos, and it designs posts in your look, plans a season of them on a calendar and posts them at set times, with every post yours to approve or change first.