photo tent help or camera question

[Reid Strand]

Hello all,

I need help with photos, mostly because I wouldn't know a good photo if I actually took one, which is unlikely. However, I need to take a few, so I set up a pvc type photo booth and threw 2 different colored sheets over it and a dirty old off white shade as the background. Obviously, I need to head to home depot or a fabric store. Oh, and I need different bulbs. and I need to turn my flash off. That being said, my question at this point is that the pictures seem to show everything as either more warped than it is, or very 2 dimensional looking. I just have a basic point and shoot sort of camera (Olympus FE-370). Is a better lighting and exposure setup going to fix my problems, or should I be talking to Santa about a new Camera? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jim Tobias]

Reid,
I'm no photo expert but I went through the same issue not too long ago and found an article that was extremely helpful. I at least began to get better photos and the article helped tremendously on lighting/diffusers and also on camera settings. If you want to PM me with an email address, I'll send you the article. The PDF file is too large to attach here.

Hope it helps,
Jim

[John Beaver]

I would try to improve the lighting set up before buying a camera. You can probably achieve decent photos with the camera you have. First off, to minimize the distortion back the camera up and zoom it in a bit. The wide angle from being close causes the warp effect. Second, I would try to lower the camera a bit, to show more of the outside shape. A way to makE the bowl more 3 dimensional is to turn off the light from one side so the bowl has a brighter and a darker side. This helps the bowl look more round with more shape. A photo gradient background will also give the whole photo more depth.

[Roger Chandler]

+1 on the photo gradient background .....it will do wonders for your photography! Here is a link for a supplier where I purchased mine......

http://www.phototechinc.com/graduate.htm

[Reid Strand]

Jim- thanks for the offer. PM sent

John- Are you really saying I don't need to spend MORE money on this hobby!? This is still the turning forum, isn't it???? Thanks for the hints, I'll give them a go.

Roger- Thanks for the link.

[David DeCristoforo]

I have been fortunate enough to have had shops with plenty of natural light. Actually, I have made sure of this because lighting is something of an art and natural light can't be beat for general photography. My current shop, as you probably know is in a tent with a translucent white cover so it's full of nicely diffused natural light.

A decent backdrop is essential!

As to your distortion, this is common to all photos taken with zoom lenses regardless of the camera type. It's not exclusive to digital cameras. You just don't notice it as much if you are taking pics of "scenes". The problem is worse with "optical" zoom lenses. So it's better to "zoom out" as much as is practical and then do your composing and cropping using software. If you ever watch a prophotograph a building, they most always use a view camera with tilting lens and film boards to enable them to compensate for the distortion.

[Jamie Donaldson]

Its always entertaining to read photo tips from the masses of amateur shooters using digital cameras these days, and so far y'all have been pretty much on the money! That's encouraging to me, and means photos of turnings will better represent your turning efforts for us to enjoy. As for Reid's set-up, the lighting is too uniform side to side, and eliminating a source on one side will help if supplimented with a bounce board to fill the shadows on the off side. I am no fan of a costly gradient background as a cure-all for turning images, and have posted a Phrugal Photo Studio tutorial here on SMC as well as under the tips menu on my site JamieDonaldsonWoodturner.com

[Steve Schlumpf]

Just wanted to jump in here to post a link to Jamie's tutorial: Phrugal Photo Studio

[Steve Vaughan]

Reid, there's good advice here, and I'm sure others can chime in. Steve's link is a good one also. In addition to enjoying wood, I have an interest in photography, and for years used an Olympus point and shoot camera. In addition to what's already been said, I finally realized that setting the white balance was important, along with lighting. I now use 2 and sometimes 3 lights - these are the curly-que type from the big box store that starts with "L". I specifically looked for the ones that were marked "daylight" and also marked 5500K. I don't know all that stuff except that 5500k represents the "whiteness" of the light (I think)...like I say, I'm new but trying to learn.
Also, on my point and shoot, I tried a lot of those different settings, taking it off 'automatic.' I experimented with setting the white balance too, which was a big help. You should be able to adjust it for different lighting environments, so you could play with that a bit too. And, check your software to see if there are features where you can make adjustments to your pictures. Depending on what you have, you might be able to adjust white balance, color depth, etc. I hope it was OK, I took one of your pics and did that through my software. Others could do a much better job than I, but I just played around a bit just to tweak white balance and color...hope I didn't mess things up. Anyway, those are some of the things that helped me out.
woodturners pic on site-2.jpg