oldskool wrote on 02.04.10 at 12:20:03:exxe wrote on 02.04.10 at 11:45:08:so many to do, i dont have time to explain everyone how i tkae my photos
I have seen a post on here before with your photo setup, I cannot find it. I only wanted the link
http://www.falconfly.de/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1171810382/675Scroll down a little bit. That's the picture you mean.
A (very) simple guide to take pictures.
Buy or make a light tent, that way you get uniform lighting without hard shadows etc. Google is your friend.
Make sure you get uniform lighting on the sides of the tent. Get some simple desk lamps, with daylight bulbs in there.
At this point it probably best to inform what camera you have. The more professional you get, generally speaking will make your pictures look better. But decent digital cameras still can make a good picture.
Make sure you put the camera on manual. Make sure you set your white balance properly first, to ensure the colours are all accurate. An 18% Grey card will help with this. You set a custom white balance (check manual on how to do this)
If you do not do this, you can get either a blueish tint, or yellowish tint to images, just because of the colour temperature.
Our eyes adjust automatically to every sort of light, so that white is white. A camera isn't smart. You need to tell it what is white etc.
Next, you need a way to shoot a card from the top down. And you need to keep the camera stable. Thus you need a tripod. You can have two different tripods. One with a reversable center post, like I've got. Or one with a horizontal arm. The first one is generally speaking more expensive. This is my tripod, the setup looks a little bit different now, but it's generally the same :
http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=p1050632wakh.jpgWhat you want to do, is when taking pictures is to use the self timer, to make sure there is no vibration, which makes the pictures blurry.
To get straight lines to come out straight, you need to zoom in a little bit. A lot of lenses, suffer from barrel distortion, which basically transforms straight lines in pictures, a like a fish bowl image, where the top of the car looks all curved. Not what you want. To prevent this, use middle focal zoom. You can of course get special macro lenses, but they cost £££.
For camera settings, names of settings vary, but here is a small list.
Sensitivity : ISO 100
Custom White balance
Spot Metering Mode
Aperture : F5.6
Shutter speed 1/10-1/13
AF mode, spot focusing
Make sure picture quality is set to highest, same with resolution.
If you got a macro auto focus setting, make sure you use that.
After shooting the pictures, you edit the picture, making sure all the background is uniformly white. More on this tomorrow.
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