From the opening post by WillowontheWater:
"Sure, you CAN get some great shots off of a low end camera, but how long does it take? Not only to get the shot, but then to edit it? I have said it before and I'll say it again... the proper tool makes all the difference."I added my own thoughts to the subject too. Whilst the opening post had some indisputable truths, I felt that it was in no way the whole story. Getting decent product photographs is a combination of equipment - both camera, lighting and staging - but perhaps the most significant factor is technique. Understanding your camera, some of the basic principles of photography and how to get the best from what you have, would actually solve the vast majority of photography problems posted about in the forums.
Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view, they look rather dark here on the page.
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The advice posted is often to shift the levels in photo editing software retrospectively, when in reality, all the crafter needs is to do is to add some positive exposure compensation to ensure that the white background looks white in the resulting images.
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Much more detail on overcoming this sort of photography problem is covered in my small item photography tutorial and doesn't need to be repeated in detail here at this time - and I have a list of all my photography articles and blogs on this page here on the blog.
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If your lighting level is low, you may encounter problems associated with slow shutter speeds for example, resulting in camera shake from your hands moving whilst the shutter is open to take the shot - that can be overcome by either changing camera exposure settings to ensure a faster shutter speed, where that's practical and possible to do so (it wasn't in my little experiment shots here due to camera limitations), or by using a support for the camera, like a tripod or bean bag.
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It was my contention, as already stated, that technique is by far the most powerful tool in your arsenal - I've often said that a little know-how and understanding can make a massive difference. All of the photographs posted here were taken with a Fujifilm A850 camera that my husband uses as his own walkaround camera. He has no interest in fiddling with settings, so I've pre-set this model with some settings to suit his personal uses for the camera and he just switches it on and squirts away at the scenery and gets some annoyingly good results too.
The camera is very basic - it cost us under £60 GBP 4+ years ago. It has 3 modes, one for photographing babies that doesn't use flash and offers soft skin tones (I'd like to try that for this task, it might actually work quite well), fully Automatic and what they call a 'Manual' mode - which in reality is the same as auto, but the camera relinquishes decisions about some settings to the user. I chose the latter and put some objects in my usual lighting setting - a daylight fluorescent ring light with a diffuser over my subject - I couldn't adjust exposure other than by using exposure compensation and I couldn't even turn off the flash, which seemingly came on when the shutter speed went too low - so I found I could prevent this from happening by being careful with the exposures I secured.
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I found focusing more tricky than with my usual, slightly more featured product photography camera and I can see now that some aren't optimally focused, so some more time with the camera would learn the quirks of its focusing - as it tended to shoot with a wide open aperture and this led to a shallower depth of field than I usually try to achieve, which in turn gives a greater margin of error for sharpness - so as I can't control aperture, I'd need to be more mindful of that in future and focus more carefully.
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Far from spending a lot of time on these, they had exactly the same workflow as I usually perform on my product shots - in fact somewhat less, as these are sharpened in the camera and have higher contrast than I normally use, so I reduced/omitted these stages in my post processing. I started typing my post here less than 30 minutes after picking up the camera, so that was the time I spent taking the shots, dusting some of my props, booting the computer I download images onto, transferring them over the network to my working computer (which acts as my back up method too), choosing frames, post processing and saving the finished images.
The exposures/tonality are largely as they came out of the camera, I cropped for framing, tweaked white balance a little as the auto WB did fluctuate a bit between frames (I wouldn't normally choose it for that very reason), did very modest levels adjustment - as I would with any shots - cloned out any fluff or dust and reduced in size and locally sharpened. If you want to see the exposure information, the EXIF data should be intact in the images, but you'll probably have to click through the image to the gallery overlay, then select the link for 'Show original' in the bottom left hand corner.
I was curious to try and see just how workable a very basic 'low-end' camera could be in practice and whilst I can see there are clearly some shortfalls in these photographs and they certainly don't look that pretty at full resolution, the results are actually better than I was expecting and having checked them on the computer, if I were to repeat the exercise now with what I've already learned, I would expect the next series would be somewhat better with appropriate tweaks in my own technique appropriate to this camera.