I chose upper-left simply because these sorts of photos would likely would be framed in a way that the background is visible in the upper margins, while possibly cropping the object at the bottom of the frame.
I want to stress that this code is massively simplified to avoid obscuring the main plot. There's so much we skipped: the code in the blog post actually computes pretty terrible results compared to an even moderately tuned pipeline :)
That's fine. I am a day away from starting an image processing app and was thinking of Python and some libraries. This blog confirms that idea and gives the right amount of "starting point" for my effort. My requirements are very different so showing a more specific solution while still interesting is of less universal value. Perhaps a part-II with more application specific methods would be good.
I would submit that most professionally photographed fashion items would endeavor to include sufficient contrast between the background and the item being photographed.