Blogging-Techniques: How I Shoot My Photos

Hi you guys!
I just lately started a new series called Blogging-Techniques, and here *click* I showed you the first episode, how I write my reviews.
Now it's time for a post about how I take my pictures!
I really think that pictures are one of the essential parts of blogs, because without any photos you wouldn't be able to see the colors or products I'm talking about. A word description can never be as clear as a photo. So I hardly post anything without pictures in the post.
When taking pictures, it's really important to have a good camera. Some of my followers who have been reading my blog for more than half a year now might remember my bad-quality pictures from back then. Well, I didn't have a better camera, and you could see that in the pictures. Luckily I now have a better one. The one I'm using is the Samsung PL80 digital camera, and I'm really content with it. As you can tell by the photos I post, it takes good ones, especially in the Macro mode. That one is really really important when it comes to make-up pictures. For those of you who don't know it, with the Macro mode you're able to take photos that are really close to the object, and they're still focused. On this picture example you can see that: The first picture was taken in the normal automatic mode, and the second one in the macro mode.

normal

macro; the polish is Essie - Limited Addiction, btw *click*

Then the lighting is important, of course. I always try to take my pictures in both direct sunlight and normal daylight, but sometimes the sun's just not showing up. But I definitely never take my pictures in artificial light or with flash. They're all taken in normal daylight, because that just makes the colors look way more true to what they look like in real life. Some colors, like red, are really hard to capture, but in normal daylight it works fine most of the time.
You should also pay attention to the background. I try to do mine with a neutral, or, in the best case, white background, but as you can tell from my photos that's not always working. Just keep in mind that the background color can always have an effect on how the color of the thing you're taking a picture of looks like on the photo. So neutral backgrounds are best.
I never change colors or retouch my photos, because I want them to be the way they are in real life. The only thing I do is that I cut and turn them, or put them in collages. For that I use the website Picnik.com, because it's free and does a good job for me.
The size is also important, I always do the pictures so you can still click on them to enlarge them. I want you to be able to see any little details, and that they are still focused.
Next I take more than one picture. When you take a decent amount, you'll be able to select the pretty ones and don't have to take what you got. I also think it's important to include some more photos into a blog post, so you can get and overview. Every picture has some good and bad sides to it, and a bigger number can show it all.
I don't try have the perfect photo frame with every shot. Most of the time, every picture I take is shows about twice as much as I want it to show. When I take lip photos for example, on most of the pictures you can also see my nose and my cheeks. And afterwards I cut out what I really need, in this part only the lips. It's just way easier that way, and not every shot has to be perfect.
There's always a signature on my pictures. It happens quite often that people just download pictures from other people and then use them as if they were their own. So when somebody has to download my pictures, there's at least my signature on it. If you want to use my pictures, you can do that, but please give me credit for it! That's that ;)
So guys, I'm sorry that this post's this long, but I hope you found this informative! Did I leave anything out you want to hear about? And what do you want for the next episode of Blogging-Techniques?
Until next time,
xoxo, Misch