YOUR STUDIO
This is a great can’o-worms. However, it is not necessary to draw the gold card. Perhaps the most important piece of equipment you need is nothing more than a large north-facing window. Add a table or desk, and some brown paper and you’re in business.
Or trick things out with a cheap vinyl roller blind nailed to the wall above the table and you’ll be able to set up or take down your studio in seconds. Make it wider than the material you want to photograph and long enough to pull down behind the material and hang over the table. It does what’s called a no-look background, but make it one size larger than you think you’ll need it, trust me on this.
LIGHTS:
This is where we come out from under the flash. It may well be that the big old window will do the trick. Or go out and do it there. But do it on the north side of the building. Direct sun, from the south, will not do it, too gray and hard. Or do it on a cloudy day. Some photographers love the soft, even light of a cloudy day.
There’s a lot to be said for plain old-fashioned incandescent or high-efficiency fluorescent light bulbs, it doesn’t matter. But use all of the same type. Your software can correct the overall color, but it’s considerably more difficult to correct blue light on one side and yellow light on the other. More on the software later.
A pair of $5.00 clamp-on reflectors from the hardware store works great. Pull up a couple of high-top kitchen chairs, clip lights to the top, place them on either side of your setup, and you’re in business. Entire books have been written on how to place lights for dramatic effect. Backlight to make her hair glow, front light to make her stand out against a black background, light from below to make her look exotic. High on the right, low on the left. Who knows. Do what seems good in your eyes. There is one place where you may want to go the extra mile. Bright and shiny things appreciate a…..
LIGHT TENT:
A light tent is nothing more than the means of diffusing light around what you want to photograph. The key here is that it SURROUNDS your objects. Suppose you are taking pictures of jewelry. What you need is a frame to cover the top, both sides and the back and hold some sort of diffusing material. You use your two reflectors attached to your kitchen cabinets. As for the spread material, a photographer I read suggested a pillowcase. Make a frame out of unbent hangers and masking tape. Then use masking tape to cover it with a few layers of waxed paper. Or make a fancy folding/unfolding thing out of a thin sheet of translucent plastic. Or find a good size cardboard box, cut out the center of each side and use it with spray adhesive and thin white cloth or marker paper. A dozen ways to do it.
If the objects you’re photographing are small enough, you might be able to tape a cone from a large sheet of paper, cut a hole in the front to fit your photos through, and you’re done. You are simply looking to get large translucent surfaces on some sides of what you want to photograph. Your digital camera will work out the exposure for you if you give it a little help with the lights and the tent.
YOUR COMPUTER:
You may think I’m stating the obvious when I suggest that your computer should be a part of this, but the most practical thing you can do to make your “studio” work well is to move your computer into your study, or move your study close to your computer. . My “studio,” the other end of a large desk with a vinyl blind on the wall above, sits right next to my computer and I load, PhotoShop, TAG, and archive the images as soon as I take them. Useful enough for me when taking 5 or 10 photos at a time, but if you’re documenting a lifetime of collecting, say just a few hundred, items, this degree of convenience will go a long way in supporting accuracy. , integrity and ultimately your SANITY.
SOFTWARE:
Another can of worms, this. I have to admit that my own study technique – good or partially to begin with – has gotten a bit sloppy since I got the good software (PhotoShop) and took a class on how to use the stuff. It seems my camera and scanner came with photo editing software that I never bothered to open and now the CDs are long gone so I can’t really comment on what you might need to do to modify your photo. I might also mention that almost all of my work is online, and it may not be the best way to go if you print it. However, this is what I normally do when I have footage off-camera and uploaded to my computer. (This applies to Adobe PHOTOSHOP.)
#1. From the Photoshop menu, I’m going to do Image, Adjustments, Brightness, and Contrast. Sometimes I also bend the color a bit to one side or the other. Pay particular attention to the Shadows/Midtones/Highlights buttons while adjusting colors.
#2 Crop and resize. Because I do it for my website. most of my images are 300px wide and I let the height go where needed. Or I make them 300 tall and let the width follow proportionally. Sometimes, for example, for the money shot at the top of the page, I use 500 width and make thumbnails 100 or 150 width.
#3. Sometimes I select specific parts of the image to get a little complicated. The pick feature is beyond the scope of our needs, but burning and dodging is often worth it. But do it gradually -10 – 20% force and use a soft edged “brush”.
#4. If you do a lot of rectangular things like I do, tables and drawers etc, you might want to play around with the Edit, Transform, Skew feature to straighten the sides of things.
#5. Only after the image is sized do I do my sharpening. I rarely sharpen more the first time, and honestly, I’m not smart enough to do the unsharp mask thing, but I’ve heard some really good PhotoShoppers insist that’s the only way to do it. Again, I think this might be more important for the Internet than for print.
SOME FINAL CONSIDERATIONS:
1. If your collection is really valuable, consider hiring a professional; this has the added benefit of having a witness who can provide another layer of third party documentation, perhaps even a dated and notarized statement of what he photographed.
2. If you can’t afford a professional, hire a high school kid. Or a high school kid for that matter. God knows they know more about technology than you or me.
3. Stephen Dow has written on the subject in more detail than I have, from the perspective of a photographer rather than a collector. You might want to take a look at CreativePro.com and search for “digital-photography-how-to-build-a-light-tent”.