As promised after the comments in the Figures forum here is some info about my photo studio. This is where I take all the pictures for Animobil including the Shields section and the Figures pages located there. It is a closet space in my finished attic.
As you see there is a clothes rod across the space that I have hung a two bulb fluorescent light fixture from. The bulbs in that are just standard ones. There is also a three light spot light fixture. The bulbs in that are special ones. They are 13 watt mini fluorescent spiral bulbs. The type is Natural Light at 5000 kelvin with an output of 880 lumens each. The equivalent of a 60 watt incandescent bulb, but in a natural light spectrum. There are three of them so that's giving me 2640 lumens quite close to the photo area, plus the light from the big tubes as well. In a small space with light colored walls to reflect the light down it provides quite a bit of light so that I never have to use flash for my camera and only have to make minor light adjustments and no color adjustments on the photos.
My standard background for site images is a piece of Canson grey artist paper. I chose the grey because it shows black and white items equally well and doesn't splash any reflected color onto the items being photographed. This is important for color trueness. If you use a colored background the light reflected onto the item from the background will join with the light coming at you directly from the item and effect the perceived color. You can see it's a large sheet that has been taped up and then curved. This avoids any seam in the image, and if there is enough curve the light with be gradated rather than in solid bands of lighter and darker tones.
I use Photoshop Elements 6 which is quite a few updates behind but it works fine for my needs. I open the photo there and crop the image, reduce the size to web size. For the Figures images I am using a standard height of 500 pixels so they look good together on the page. The exception being the exploded views that are all 600 pixels wide instead.
My camera is a Canon PowerShot SX 210 IS that is now about 4 years old. Between photos for the website, travel and other things I have lapped the counter twice, so that's over 20,000 pictures with it and thousands more next month with my trip to Germany coming up. So needless to say I have been happy with this one. Most shots are taken in the auto mode, which adjusts to macro automatically depending on the auto focus. I am not doing anything too fancy, it's just a basic point and shoot type camera. It does have a decent 14x optical zoom, but that is used mainly outside. Image size is always set to the maximum size and quality. It's much better to reduce down for web use from a really big image than to have one that's not high enough quality to start.
So the basics for good item photography -
1. As much light as possible, but not so strong and from a single source that it causes dark shadows. Ideally this is in a natural light range that is well balanced.
2. A camera that has good sensitivity, decent quality but it certainly doesn't need to be thousands of dollars with multiple lenses etc.
3. A neutral background that wont alter the colors
I hope this is helpful. Thanks for reading
