Taking professional looking pictures?

Have you tried a "milk bottle diffuser" on your existing flash? get one of those translucent white plastic milk bottles (not the totally opaque ones) cut a strip off and tape it (domed) over your flash. Lots of people use that instead of a stoffen diffuser or a lightsphere. Should work fine even on a compact camera.

 

Kev,

Did you get this sorted? A shame you posted this just after I got back from NYC!!

If you haven't sorted it out, I'm going to NJ in May. I will have my camera with me, so we could pop to Calumet and hire some gear and take some shots.... or if you want your own gear, pop to B&H.

If space is a problem, go for a table that collapses, or a light tent. You can get light tents that easily accomodate consoles. Here are some pics I took years ago in a light tent (resized).







I think these were taken on my Nikon 5mp prosumer.. that or an early Pentax dSLR.

 

Here is my setup :icon_bigg

 

Is that a picture of a mouse on your wall?

 

Hmm... this one you mean?

 

lol, from a distance it looks like a mouse or wombat or something. that's actually pretty cute!

 

look at the pictures... I used a case also, used white paper to put the object on.. and used 4 cheap lamps (2 on each side) and you get a great quality... if you want less direct light use paper to cover the lamps... it acts as a difusor... be carefull not to set your house on fire, because paper and hot lamps don't mix well

maximum cost: $50

 

That's why you use proper photographic lamps - they stay cool so you can put them close to things ;-) That, and they are a cooler colour so don't taint the image as much as domestic lighting. OK, you'd definately be spending more than $50, but it is worth it if you do a lot of product photography.

 

Here's a do-it-yourself guide that I found for making lightboxes. I nabbed it off a Lego forum but the principle still applies.

Click Me

 

If the object is of smaller size you can also scan it, it gives a very bright and high resolution digitized image.

 

Hi Guys,

this is one when I just opened a factory sealed virtual league baseball game.



Taken with an EOS350D

Xyus

 

Xyus, the point of the "professional looking" part of the original question was that they want an image of just the item. In other words, shoot on a white background with no discernible edges.

Whilst your shot is very nicely laid out and taken with a nice dSLR camera (technically not professional - Canon wouldn't class that as in their professional range), you might want to look back to the setups some people used, even the simple curved paper approach. Then you need to light it well (evenly). If you try doing that with your product and compare the results, I'm sure you will be impressed at how much of an improvement it makes ;-)

 

I recently got a new camera (Sony A900) so i did a photo of GBA cartridge using my macro lens, probably better to scan it but this was just an test.
Every dust particle is seen way to good

Original image size here: http://arcade.ym2149.com/misc/gba_cart.jpg

 

As an A700 user, I officially hate you OH:.

 

what about this? Shot with a cheap ass (well it is now) Panasonic Lumix.



The lighting is poor due to it being taken on the kitchen floor but the actual image seem sharp enough using the micro setting.

Yakumo

 

@retro: thanks for the advice! This picture was taken in all les than 2 minutes, but thanks for the advice.

 

Excellent, Yakumo! I'm so anal I probably would have edited out the little specs of visible dust, but other than that, I'd be thoroughly pleased if I could produce something like that. :icon_bigg
-ud

 

that's a beautiful picture of the wondermega. i've saved it to my computer forever. :love:

 

man, If I knew people would have liked that image I would have kept the full resolution shot to give out That picture above and more will be added to my site in the next update this coming weekend.

yakumo

 

Hey Yak are you sure you didn't steal that pic from my website? hehehe

I've tried a bunch of different cameras and settings, and I've learned that without a SLR there's pretty much a max quality you're going to get. Digital camera + indoor lighting = basically shitty quality overall, every time.