I have what I think is a good digital compact (Leica c-lux-2), but no idea how to take a good pen pic that translates well onto FPN. Any assistance from officanados out there, would be very welcome!

Use natural light if at all possible, and a light tent or light box to shoot the pen without shadows.

The lampshade trick works wonders, too.

Use a tripod or some kind of camera support. Hand holding will give you blurry pics most of the time.

OK, I am going to bite, what is the lampshade trick?

Hoped someone would take the bait. Read this article by Jim Mamoulides. It's an excellent idea and it works.

Here's a shot I took inside a lampshade. Used natural light, and let the shade do the diffusing work.



I should have used something on top of the concrete to make it a little less boring, but the lampshade did allow me to capture the colors of the pen without the distraction of shadows.

What a great idea - thanks for the link. I shall give it a try soon.

Gee, that's a simple, inexpensive trick! Thanks for sharing!

Any camera with 4 megapixels (4MP) or more has a higher resolution than 35mm film, and the range of colours they can handle is improving all the time.

However, one of the problems with many of the more inexpensive (<$1000) digital cameras is that the sensors can't handle the contrast range that film can. This is why you need a low-contrast lighting situation (lamp shade, bounce flash off a white surface, etc). However, if you can fit in a small point point source of light (a small torch bulb without reflector, for example) you can get a nice 3d effect that makes the image look less flat.

Once you have your picture, and have copied it to your computer, don't forget to resize it before you post it on the FPN. The quality of image that you need to print out a photo is far higher than you need to view it on a computer screen. I typically reduce my images to one third or one quarter of the original image size before posting it. Also, the resolution doesn't need to be higher than 72 dpi.

Really????





All the above images were handheld at high f stop numbers. The reason that there is no blur is that the shutter speed was kept high by use of flash guns.

Use low ISO, manual white balance, timed shutter release and a tripod. I essentially cheat to be able to handhold those shots by shooting with nearly full power strobes into softboxes and umbrella's. I believe that I used ISO 160 for those shots so I did not get noise or grain in the images.

Set a middle of the road f stop number on your point and shoot and you will get bags of depth of field. Separate the pen from the background even if it is only by an inch or two. Use neutral backgrounds so that they do not compete with the pen for the viewers attention. Learn how to set manual white balance, or include a white or black object in the image so you can set the white balance in post processing.

Learn how to use photoshop to touch up images, correct color casts, set white point, sharpen etc. Any decent image editor is capable of these changes. For all of the images above, all I did in post was to ensure that the contrast was good, boosting it a little here and there. I also sharpened slightly so as to not create any artifacts in the image. Oh, and I think I resized them too, but the last thing I did was the sharpening. Always do that last, as it can really make a difference if you resize the image after sharpening.

Cheers,
Sean

Cheers,
Sean

Great info, Sean--thanks so much for sharing. I hate to admit it, but I've never used the white balance feature on my camera. I think it's set in automatic mode. Is there much of an advantage using the white balance setting versus color balancing the resulting image in a photo editor?

Auto WB can occasionally give some erroneous readings, especially if there is an overabundance of light or dark tones in the image. For instance, a shot of a white card will actually look a little grey sometimes with Auto WB. This can lead to color casts in images. Using the color cast removal tool in photoshop is a little inconsistent in my opinion. The images that I attached above were not shot with manual preset white balance,yet they are pretty close to reality. They were all set on flash, but as I always use flashguns for pen images, it is close enough.I use the levels command and then pick the whitest part of my image to set the white balance. This gets one close, but the real way to get it right is to set the white balance manually with an 18% grey card. This is especially true if there are lots of different colors in the image. 18% grey is what the meter in your camera is trying to average the whole gamut of tones in your image to. This then gets into a discussion of dynamic range and highlight clipping or blow out and dark blockiness.

So the easiest way to get correctly colored images (at least on most average users monitor, we won't get into monitor calibration here) is to use a grey card and set the white balance manually prior to imaging the pens. You users manual will walk you through this as it is different on pretty every camera out there. On mine, Nikon D80, I hold down the funtion button for WB and twirl the command dial with my thumb to SET. Then I hold down the WB function button again till I see SET flash in the viewfinder. Then I just take a shot. This will set my white balance to whatever my focal point was set to in the camera. This way I can have a small sliver of grey in the image, not in the center, and evaluate off that to set WB.
Then I just start shooting.

Take a look at my avatar, I love that image, but the background was white in real life, not slightly grey. Auto WB strikes again. Took that image before I knew to change the WB and what it would do.

Now, one caveat, don't use fluorescent lighting for images. Those lights flicker on a 60Hz frequency which can lead to exposure issues, as well as color shifts. I use two flashguns fired wirelessly for consistent color in all my images. The only time I need to worry about color casts is if I image pens in my basement. The walls are a really unattractive yellow that really reflects into my images. That is when I will use Photoshop to remove the color cast if I am being lazy, or manual WB if I am not being lazy.

Again, diffuse lighting is key to keeping the highlights from blowing out totally and losing all detail in them. Take a look at the P51 image, you can still make out detail in the highlights along the pen, it is not just a blaring white blob. Use the camera's histogram and "expose to the right", which means to manually adjust your exposure to capture as much detail in the highlights as possible without going off the right of the histogram. This ensures that you will not blow out the highlights. If for instance you shot an image at f8 and .06s exposure and the histogram had a gap between the rightmost axis and the bars on the graph, then you could open up the f stop to say f6.3. Your aim should be to just lightly brush the bars of the graph up against the right axis. Any more and the highlights are blown. Most camera's will also blink to show you blown out areas of the image, you can then adjust your exposure back down until those just go away.

Cheers,
Sean

hand held can yield sharp shots, even with basic P & S cameras.

regards

david

To clarify what Sean said: The fast speed is from the short duration of the strobe units, not the camera shutter. As long as the shutter is at or slower than the maximum sync speed of the camera and no other light sources exist, the shutter could be open for minutes with the same results. The fast shutter simply reduces the influence of any existing constant light source.

I'm guessing Sean's strobes fire around 1/500th of a second, give or take. The circuits on modern small flash units can reduce the duration for closeup auto exposure to durations in excess of 1/40,000th of a second. I believe the normal max sync speed for Sean's camera is 1/200th which is plenty fast for most consumer applications.

A popular trick among sports photographers was to modify the circuits on studio lights (usu. Speedotrons or Elinchroms) for short durations for shooting in arenas. Shooters who have tried to light an event with a cheapo beginner set of studio lights would learn a hard lesson about flash duration times.

Bill

another hand held shot

-d

Really like the lampshade idea. Simple and effective.

Do you have a hand held shot of you taking the hand held shot? I'd like to inspect the technique.