ausf
Master at Arms
You know how at noon at the beach you can see every detail of that bikini from 100 yards away, but will walk into lawn furniture at dusk? Our eyes are designed to pick out detail and color in daylight, not at night. Dog's eyes don't detect color well but see great at night. The camera is just a simple version of our eye.
Photography is all about light. The more light, the better for detail and focus. Light adds depth of field (width of area in focus), so more of your model will be clear. When I say more light, I mean intensity of it, not quantity. Nzgunnie nailed it in terms of what you need on a static subject: three lights at most, but one well aimed with some reflection will work well. Ideally, you use one main (key) light, one fill and a background. The fill is less insense than te key and usually comes in from the other direction, meant to hit any dark spots on the subject. The third, if you want, is the least intense and is aimed at the background just to cut shadows cast by the first two.
Get as much light on it as you can, even more so if it's a cheap camera. Shoot outside on a bright day if you can, but not in direct sunlight, that's as bad as using a flash. Just set up near the house (provided it's a light color) to get reflective bounce. Remember the old photos of people taning with the trifold aluminum screen under their neck. Use that to do the same on a model. On exterior movie shoots, they use huge reflective panels to aim the ambient light whereever they want.
As mentioned, tripods are great, but...in low or medium light, just the action of depressing the trigger is enough movement to knock the pic out of focus. Set the selfie timer.
This pic of my Iwata nozzle for the review is a good example of depth of field/light. Look at what's in focus, just the tip and the very front of the threads, the rest of the housing, immediately in front and behind the nozzle is blurry. The depth of field is about a quarter of an inch. That's with a hundred watt bulb about three inches away from it, coming from above right. It wasn't shot with a tripod, but the camera is propped on a box and there's enough bright hot light, the shutter speed was very fast. The faster the shutter speed, the less chance of going out of focus from movement.
Another point is background. If you have a simple sheet of paper (you can get 2 X 3 sheets of cheap colored paper or plain newsprint), the camera has nowhere to focus but on the model. Us too, since our eye is always looking for detail, at least the way my eye looks, I see plane, box background, what's on the bench, what's cooking on the stove. etc. If there's a solid color background, I only look at the plane.
Photography is all about light. The more light, the better for detail and focus. Light adds depth of field (width of area in focus), so more of your model will be clear. When I say more light, I mean intensity of it, not quantity. Nzgunnie nailed it in terms of what you need on a static subject: three lights at most, but one well aimed with some reflection will work well. Ideally, you use one main (key) light, one fill and a background. The fill is less insense than te key and usually comes in from the other direction, meant to hit any dark spots on the subject. The third, if you want, is the least intense and is aimed at the background just to cut shadows cast by the first two.
Get as much light on it as you can, even more so if it's a cheap camera. Shoot outside on a bright day if you can, but not in direct sunlight, that's as bad as using a flash. Just set up near the house (provided it's a light color) to get reflective bounce. Remember the old photos of people taning with the trifold aluminum screen under their neck. Use that to do the same on a model. On exterior movie shoots, they use huge reflective panels to aim the ambient light whereever they want.
As mentioned, tripods are great, but...in low or medium light, just the action of depressing the trigger is enough movement to knock the pic out of focus. Set the selfie timer.
This pic of my Iwata nozzle for the review is a good example of depth of field/light. Look at what's in focus, just the tip and the very front of the threads, the rest of the housing, immediately in front and behind the nozzle is blurry. The depth of field is about a quarter of an inch. That's with a hundred watt bulb about three inches away from it, coming from above right. It wasn't shot with a tripod, but the camera is propped on a box and there's enough bright hot light, the shutter speed was very fast. The faster the shutter speed, the less chance of going out of focus from movement.
Another point is background. If you have a simple sheet of paper (you can get 2 X 3 sheets of cheap colored paper or plain newsprint), the camera has nowhere to focus but on the model. Us too, since our eye is always looking for detail, at least the way my eye looks, I see plane, box background, what's on the bench, what's cooking on the stove. etc. If there's a solid color background, I only look at the plane.
:dude
