FAVORITE TIPS FOR PHOTOGRAPHING THE COLLECTION

collection photographyFavorite Tips for Photographing a Collection

If you are making documentary photographs, the first thing to keep in thoughts is to do it straight- on from front, side, top, etc. Add as many other sides or views object’s size and value appear to justify. If it opens-up in some way, open it and fire it again. Up to you, but digital photos on a CD are poor enough that your calm should be a better beam then the price of movie and prints. Imagine yourself explaining to your insurer because it costs $$$$ and fire accordingly.

Photo prisoner by Beebo Wallace (Click Image to See More From Beebo Wallace)

Here is another other idea for the await side of the silver -put a woman monarch in the design and put it tighten to your collectible and on all sides it exact to your camera angle. Or make a little scale with paper and black marker. Or a yard-stick. Depends on the size of your object. You can do the await this way and mislay the woman monarch for the pretty design withdrawal all else set up.

Documentation and Aesthetics:

Terrific photography is made out of a lot of stuff like technique, composition, and vision. Can’t assistance you with combination or vision, but we can indicate a few points on technique and -as distant as it goes- technique functions for await purposes as well as cultured ends.

Consider this: you feel strongly about your collection, right? You wouldn’t have put the bid into pciking up all this stuff up if you didn’t find it fascinating. So let your detailed prophesy simulate your feelings about it all. This is to contend that if a imitation looks good to you -it’s probably pretty good. But give a little suspicion to climax -interesting backgrounds and props and all. Collect polite fight pistols? You ought to have a dwindle in there somewhere. Costume jewelry? How about an ostrich-feather boa? Collect rocks? What about photographing them on the suitable USGS topographic map? The one arrangement where you found the sold rock. At the very least, deposit in some fancy-ass velvet from the fabric store. Make it black, white &/or gray -colors are good to strife with or lead astray from whatever you are photographing.

There is one critical premonition here. If you are receiving pix for both await and aesthetics, take two pix. One with the lofty backgrounds and one without. Might be best not to have to demand to some lawyerly arrange (insurance adjuster) just what the black plume boar is you do there.

Equipment:

Tripod
Yep -you need one. Life is much simpler and the pix come out better. End of discussion. Well, not quite. If you are receiving genuine REAL close-up pix, (see subsequent for Macro Lenses), you might find it simpler to take the conveyor part out of the leg joint thing and put it back in from the bottom. (I have an old tripod where this is easily done, but my new one, the up-&-down-attached-to-the-camera-bit is stranded in there permanently.) It’s a little droll looking, but it creates for a easy-to-use get-up. You are arrange of operative in between the tripod legs and you can fire true down but disposition over things or carrying anything removing in the way.

how to sketch a collection“Shiny pennies” prisoner by davespilbrow (Click Image to See More From davespilbrow)

Camera
I suspect there are still folks that use movie and they probably have good reason for you do this. Ain’t me. we also suspect that these folks know just what they are you do so I’ll residence myself mostly to digital cameras. Wonderful little things -digital cameras. Mine is a few years old now -middle of the line at the time and we have no disbelief it’s now hopelessly old-fashioned compared to the ultimate and greatest, but -and compensate courtesy here- a so-so camera well used is going to give you better results then an costly camera used poorly. But we do have one idea to soup-up your little digital -especially if you are photographing small items. You can make yourself a quick and cheap…

Macro Lens
These are infrequently called ‘close-up lenses’. Most digitalis -or the not-so-expensive ones anyway- have concept concentration and don’t concentration well tighten up. Actually, they don’t concentration at all and this is part of their interest -one reduction thing to do prior to you to point and shoot. But what about sharpened -for example- a diminutive square of jewelry? From 5 or 10 feet divided it’s going to look like a spot. Here is what you do.

Schlep off to the Dollar Store and buy a integrate of span of celebration of the mass glasses. Let’s contend a #1.25 and #1.75 or 2. Also get yourself some of that yellow gummy stuff they sell in the bureau supply store. we think it might be called Handy-Tack. What you are going to do is cocktail one of the eyeglass lens out of the eyeglasses and use the gummy stuff to hang it on over the camera lens. Now you need to regulate it -unless your digital focuses through-the-lens and your eyes are younger then mine. Easier then it sounds.

Put your camera with the macro lens on the tripod and set it up a feet or two aloft then the dining-room-table. Lay out a fasten magnitude on the list from just underneath the lens to the other end of the list and take a picture. Now don’t pierce the fasten and go off to the mechanism and find out where on the fasten magnitude the design is in focus. You are not finished quite yet. Your camera is operative at a diagonal. You can possibly simply magnitude from your camera lens to place where the fasten magnitude is in focus. Or if you recollect the Pythagorean Theorem -have at it and make your old clergyman proud. Do the same for the other lens -the one with the aloft number will let you get in even closer. we keep the lenses and the gummy stuff in sandwich bags WITH the focal length WRITTEN ON THE BAGGIE. Seems that an old mental recall is as erroneous as old eyesight.

photography for collectors“my collection” prisoner by Heather (Click Image to See More From Heather)

If you have a lot of cinema to take you might cruise perplexing a little fibre to the front of you camera and snipping the end at the focal length. Then you simply reason the fibre in one palm and pierce the tripod in or out with the other hand. MUCH simpler then squinting at / through your camera every time.

Flash:

This will be short. F’ged-abou’did. Flashes are meant to light up rooms. Use a peep to light up your best coronet belt-buckle and you will have a design of glare. There is zero a peep can do that a little credentials and set-up can not do better. Flashes are excellent for operative in the margin -sports and weddings and such, but we are operative in the college of music -a handcrafted studio, but a college of music none-the-less. This brings up the last -and biggest- bit of equipment, your studio.

Your Studio:

This is a big can’o-worms. No need to lift out the gold-card though. Perhaps the most critical square of apparatus you need might be zero more then a vast north-facing window. Add a list or table top, and some grocer paper and you are in business.

Or pretence things up with a poor vinyl roll-up arrange window shade nailed up on the wall on tip of the table-top and you can set up or rip down your college of music in seconds. Make it wider then the stuff you want to fire and long enough to lift down at the back of the stuff and furnish it over the table-top. Makes for what is called a seem-less credentials But get it one size bigger then you think you will need it though -trust me on this.

Lights:

Here is where we get out from underneath the flash. It might well be that the big old window will do the trick. Or go outward and do it there. But do it on the north side of the building. Direct object -from the south- won’t get it -too grarie and harsh. Or do it on an pale day. There are photographers that adore the soothing even light from a pale day.

There is much to be pronounced for elementary light-bulbs -old fashioned illuminated or high-efficiency-fluorescent -makes no never-mind. But use all the same kind. Your program can scold the altogether tone but it’s extremely more formidable to scold the blue light on one side and yellow on the other. More on program later.

A span of $5.00 clamp-on mirror arrange from the hardware store work great. Pull up a integrate of tall kitchen chairs, clamp the lights to the top, on all sides then to possibly side of your set-up and you are in business. Whole books have been created on how to on all sides your lights for thespian effects. Back-light to make her hair glow, front light to make her mount out opposite a black background, light from subsequent to make her look exotic. High to the right, low from the left. Who knows. Do what looks good to your eye. There is one place where you might want to take a little additional effort. Shiny sparkly things conclude a…..

Light Tent:

A light tent is zero more then the equates to of diffusing light all around what ever you want to photograph. The pass here is that it SURROUNDS your objects. Let’s pretence you are receiving pix of jewelry. What you need is a await to go over the top, both sides, and back and land some arrange of diffusing material. You use your two reflectors clipped onto your kitchen chairs. As to the diffusing material, one photographer we review referred to a sham case. Make a await out of unbent garments hangers and duct-tape. Then use scotch-tape to cover it with a few layers of polish paper. Or make a whim folding / maturation thing out of skinny unclouded sheet-plastic. Or find a good sized card box, cut out the center of each side and have at it with mist glue and skinny white fabric or pen paper. A dozen ways to get’er done.

If the objects you are sharpened are small enough, it might be that you can fasten up a cone out of a vast square of paper, cut a hole in the front to take your cinema through, and you are in business. You are simply seeking to get vast unclouded surfaces on a few sides of the thing you want to photograph. Your digital camera will arrange out the bearing for you if you give it just a little assistance with the lights and tent.

photo of a collection“Nepalese currency” prisoner by Shaktiz (Click Image to See More From Shaktiz)

Your Computer:

You might think I’m belaboring the viewable when we indicate that your mechanism contingency be a part of this, but the singular handiest thing you might do to make your “studio” work well is to possibly pierce your mechanism to your college of music or pierce your college of music tighten to your computer. My “studio” -the distant end of a big table with a vinyl window shade on the wall above- sits right subsequent to my mechanism and we load, PhotoShop, LABEL, and record the cinema as shortly as we take them. Useful enough for me when we take 5 or 10 cinema at a time, but if you are documenting a life-time of pciking up -let’s contend just a few hundred- items, this grade of preference is going to go a long way to await accuracy, completeness, and ultimately, your SANITY.

Software:

Another can of worms, this. we have to confess that my own college of music technique -fair to partly to proceed with- has gotten a little messy ever since we got the good program (PhotoShop) and took a category on how to use the stuff. It seems my camera and scanner both came with some photo-retouch program that we never worried to open and now the CD’s are long left so we can’t criticism too well on what you might have to do to tweak your pix. we might also discuss that almost all of my work is to go online, and might not be the best way to go if you do the imitation thing. None-the-less, here is what we typically do when I’ve got cinema off / out of the camera and installed into my ‘puter. (This relates to Adobe’s PHOTOSHOP.)

  1. From Photoshop’s menu, we to do Image, Adjustments, Brightness and Contrast. Sometimes we also hook the tone a little one way or the other. Pay sold courtesy to the Shadows / Mid-tones / Highlights buttons as you regulate your colors.
  2. Crop and resize. Because we do it for my web-site. most of my pix are 300 pixels far-reaching and we let the tallness go wherever it needs to go. Or we do them 300 tall and let the breadth follow along proportionally. Sometimes -for the money-shot at the tip of the page for example, we go 500 far-reaching and do thumbnails 100 or 150 wide.
  3. Sometimes we name specific tools of the design to bitch up a little. The selecting duty is way over the range of our needs, but blazing and dodging mostly is value your time,. But go at it progressively -10 – 20% strength and use a soothing corner ‘”brush.”
  4. If you do a lot of rectilinear things like we do -tables and drawer-cases etc, you might want to fiddle around with the Edit, Transform, Skew duty to straighten up the sides of things.
  5. Only after the pix is sized we do my sharpening. Rarely do we whet more the once and truth-to-tell, I’m not intelligent enough to do the Unsharp Mask thing, but I’ve listened really good PhotoShoppers demand it’s the only way to go. Here again, we think this might be more critical for the internet then it is for prints.
photos of collections“I theory this is flourishing up” prisoner by Jennifer Pagan (Click Image to See More From Jennifer Pagan)

Some Final Thoughts:

  • If your pick up is genuine valuable, cruise employing a pro -this has the combined value of carrying a declare who can yield another covering of third-party await -perhaps even a antiquated and notarized make a difference as to what he or she photographed.
  • If you can’t means a pro, sinecure a high-school kid. Or middle-school child for that matter. Heaven knows they know more about techno9logy then you or I.
  • Stephen Dow has created on the theme in more item then we have -from the viewpoint of a photographer rsther than then a collector. You might want to have a look at CreativePro.com and track him up underneath “digital-photography-how-to-building-a-light-tent”

About the Author
Bill Harvey creates drawer and arrangement cases for collectors and museums at Home-Museum.com. He is also writer of the Collector’s How-To array for dedicated collectors and hobbyists who instruct to arrangement and strengthen their very best stuff.