Seeing the tutorials up top, I figured I should share something I wrote on TFW.
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Unless you have a really good professional camera (which can take good pictures in any condition), setting up a photo box is a good way to get the pictures your work deserves.
This completely amateurish work helped me take pictures such as this:
Yeah, doesn't look that hard, does it?
Total cost for the box is a couple of $10s and a little work. I got the thin wood pieces at a local lumber shop and sawed them to size (box is 60x60x50 cm, big enough for most). The bottom and shelves was a custom piece from at a home carpentry shop (Beijer, it's all over Sweden). The back is just a piece of heavy cardboard from the local art shop. The rest is just some glue and nailing (although, it would be a lot sturdier with angled iron... things... oh man, I really don't have the English vocabulary for carpentry... "vinkelbleck".
As you can see I made three loose shelves in the easiest possible way. These can then be combined for pretty much any configuration of steps. Just make sure the combined height of the small ones are the same as the big one, and you're done. Mine are 9 cm tall and 7 cm deep for the small ones, and 18 cm tall and 14 cm deep for the big one.
A separate pair of cardboard sheets for additional backdrops if I need to take pictures at an angle.
The cloth, as you can see, is a very opaque piece because of the silver front. It gets slightly shiny in a soft way without highlights. I'm completely surprised by myself finding such an excellent piece of cloth on my first try. I drape it under the back piece and then across any shelves I have for the shooting.
Finally I added three very cheap reading lights. I could have gone with actual spotlights but these were cheaper. Together they give a very bright light. I set them up through a single switch for simplicity, which also powers the camera so I'm not wasting batteries.
With that, a Canon Powershot A540 and very basic photography skills, I get this:
The rest is all up to Photoshop. The thing about using a white background is that it's really, really easy to just adjust the Normal levels. Of course, you might want differently coloured backgrounds for the studio look if you're not just putting your pictures on a white backdrop. You could of course take pictures on a non-white background and then crop them in Photoshop with the selection tool, but it's gonna look horrible. Using Normal, I can reduce the shadows that they lights can't handle and still keep a faint, natural shadow beneath my figures.
Really basic but really important info: save all your work in a lossless format like PSD or PNG or TGA/TIF as soon as you can, because if you keep working on your JPGs off your camera they're gonna be ruined in quality after a few saves. Only save down to JPG again once you're done. And even then, consider PNG for pictures with lots of red because that always sucks in JPG.
This post has been edited by Smokescreen: 7 December 2007, 23:29
Photographing your work, Lighting, setting up, photography and editing
7 December 2007, 23:46
Arlöv, Sweden
