Gallery, Projects and General > How to's
Taking photos in the workshop
Darren:
Thank you Tim for waking me up on this issue. I've been very lazy of late with my camera work,
Examples, hope you all don't mind me repeating these pictures cos I've just put them up elsewhere.
This one was taken on the cameras auto setting with built in flash and hand held.
f/3.5 1/60 second exposure
This one the cameras flash was turned off, I used lighting to the right of the camera with a 500W bulb on a tripod
f/36 and 15 second exposure, camera on a tripod
This one has the same light to the side plus a halogen above (the mill light)
f/36 10 second exposure
I hope you can see the difference, If they were loaded onto a web page properly and linked from there there would be a bigger difference as photobucket seriously reduces the file size and quality so a lot of the effort is lost.
spuddevans:
Thanks for posting those Darren,they help to show some differences in light sources and directions.
F36 :bugeye: that's pretty much stopped down as far as they go.
I'm gonna take a couple of pics in the next couple of days to illustrate another point, and I also want to do a post on photographing highly reflective objects, but I've got to do a little experimenting with that one. I'll try and post up my experiences for all to see.
I looked at your site Steve and am seriously impressed with your artistic and PP skills :clap: :thumbup:
Sorry for not updating this earlier, there are a few subjects I want to cover, and I can see them in my head, but I find trouble extracting them in a way that wont appear like they've been written by a demented babboon on speed. So I kinda have to chew things over for a bit to try and get it down on (electronic) paper.
Tim
Darren:
re f36
Yes right down, as far as I know that's not the best place to be? around the middle should be better?
I need to experiment some more, just ordered some new bulbs. I'm going to try those new low energy types and see how they compare to my 500w tungstens.
Two or three of them on and it starts to get pretty warm around here !!!
Please post some more, I quite keen to learn on this subject.... :)
spuddevans:
--- Quote from: Darren on May 21, 2009, 05:11:38 AM ---re f36
Yes right down, as far as I know that's not the best place to be? around the middle should be better?
--- End quote ---
Well, you will get more depth of field with F36, but most lenses tend to suffer with increased softness at such small apertures, from what I've read, most lenses are at their sharpest when stopped down between about 2-3 F-stops from wide open, so if your lens is a F2.8 then around F5.6 will be pretty mush as sharp as you can get, of if your lens is a F4 or F5.6 then F8-11 will yield sharpest results.
That being said, there's no magic F number, you may have selected the sharpest F-stop but may have a subject that is only half in focus. So it can be a matter of compromise. If you can't get the whole subject in focus at the desired aperture then you will have to use a smaller (confusingly a higher F number) aperture as there's no point having a photo of a subject where only a part is pin-sharp and the rest is fuzzy, better to compromise and get an overall-slightly-less-sharp photo with all the desired elements in focus. ( I do have a technique that I will go into at another time that gives Pin-Sharp photos with all desired elements in spot on focus, but I want to deal with the basics 1st)
In short, experiment with your settings, try snapping at F36, then without changing anything other that shutter speed and aperture, try F22, then F16 and so on. Then when you open all the pics up on the pc, see which have all the desired elements in focus? Which are the sharpest? and most importantly, Which do you like the best?
spuddevans:
Ok, so I spent this afternoon playing with photographing my Elmers #25 and wanted to share my methods ( these are not the only way to achieve these results, just the way I did it (thus ends the disclaimer) )
When you want to photograph a highly reflective object (like a shiny, blinged, polished engine) what you need to think about is what will be reflected, ie the surroundings.
The easiest way to control the surroundings (reflections) in models is to spend 10 shiny pounds ( or there abouts ) (or see below for a cheaper DIY alternative) and invest in a "light tent" ( they come in all sorts of sizes from 50cm cubes up to ones that a person can stand up in ) I got a 50cm cube from ebay, I just shopped around for the cheapest one, and it came with 4 coloured inserts (red,blue,black and white) and all comes in a handy sized package shown below.
From this little package, once released it springs up to this shape in the middle of this pic (ignore the large round white reflector leaning behind the cube) (this is the setup I used to photograph my Elmers #25 final shots)
If you ignore all the stuff set up around the light tent, I lit it by a conventional flashgun on the right and a mains powered flash on the right ( the light is bounced off an umbrella. You dont need all that stuff to get exactly the same results as I did, it's just that I already had this stuff and so used it.
The idea is that you set up the light tent on a table, (a hard topped surface is better than the bed I used, I had to put a flat object under the tent) choose what background you want to use (white for nice clean shots like you see in catalogues, Black for more dramatic effect, or other colours according to your personal preference) and attach it to the tent.
Now you light it, and you can use 2 or 3 ordinary desk lamps, the sunlight if you are outside ( and in a different country to me :lol: ), really whatever light source you have, and aim them at either side and perhaps the top too. The white material that the tent is made out of diffuses the light and spreads it evenly over your model, and the shiney parts only reflect the white walls and roof of the tent giving you consistent and not distracting reflections. You can experiment with spacing your light sources differently, ie move the light on the left a bit further away than the light on the right, this will give a slight difference in intensity of light from the left and can help give your model more depth/3D-ness in the photo.
You can also experiment with putting some black card up against one side of the tent (out of the camera's view), that will change the reflections on the model. (obviously the light will not be able to go through the black card so you would need to move your light source/s to suit)
Now, having said that you can buy a light tent, you can equally make one. Imagine a cardboard box sitting on one end so that the top or the open part is facing you. Now cut large square holes in the upper, left, and right sides. Now line the whole box, covering the freshly cut holes with large sheets of tracing paper glued in place, or you could use some white nylon material to line it. Voila !! your very own homemade light tent. ( just not as collapsable as the commercial ones )
The next tip is the way to get a shot like this one, with a reflection.
This is really simple, just place a piece of glass (make sure it is very clean, as every spec of dust will be highlighted) on top of the background material and place your model on top of the glass. You probably have noticed that there is a double reflection on the above photo, that is caused by light reflecting from both the top and underside of the glass. To prevent this you need to either paint the underneath of the glass, or use a piece of glossy black acrylic instead of the glass.
Here's a pic just using the white background.
Just one final tip, when photographing your finished models, dont just position them square on to the camera, turn them a bit to an angle, you'll find the pictures much more 3D looking and more eye-catching.
Hope I havent bored you all to sleep,
Tim
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