Could a company take their own pictures for their website ?

Could a company take their own pictures for their website or catalogue?

Certainly; a lot of SMEs look at the price of hiring a photographer to do their photos and think `for a little bit more than it costs to hire Tom, we could buy our own equipment and do our own pictures'.

The trouble is, getting your photos wrong can be very expensive in lost sales while you learn. Most product photos that SMEs want are quite simple shadowless photos on a plain background. If you had to learn to take photos - that's a reasonably easy place to start.

Workflow

Photography is only a tiny part of taking good commercial photos. In my experience, the key to success is planning. Before I start any photography job I like to have a list that shows: - Every item to be photographed - How the picture will be used - What other pictures are going to be with a picture? (there might be a style to all the photos. If every photo already on a page has a car facing left, we don't want to add a photo of a car facing right.)

This will let me group together items to be shot at the same time. However hard you try, there always seems to be a slight difference in the lighting in what should be the same setup. If you want the lighting to be identical - shoot it at the same time.

What do I need in a camera?

If you want to publish a 3 inch by 2 inch picture on your web site then the sharpest monitors will show 100 dpi - 60,000 pixels. There isn't a digital camera on the market that can't do that.

If you want to use depth of field as an effect in your photo - you'll need a camera with aperture priority.

If want to use blurred movement as an effect in your photo - you'll need a camera with shutter priority.

Manual focus will allow you to focus more accurately on products close to the camera. Sometimes autofocus will focus on the wrong thing.

RAW vs. TIFF vs. JPEG files

Most of the less expensive cameras will output JPEG files. JPEG files are very compact compressed files so they're good for a person at a wedding that wants to fit as many pictures as they can on a memory card, less good if you want to get the maximum quality from your pictures. TIFFs are big. TIFFs and RAW files are uncompressed. Every time you open and resave a JPEG the compression loses a little detail. Every time you open and resave a TIFF, it will be identical to the time before. A RAW file is the cameras own language and is produced by some of the higher-end cameras. Nikon cameras produce NEF files, Fuji RAF files, Canon CRW files - every camera manufacturer has their own standard. The one thing that is common to all RAW files is that they are flexible. A good photographer will make sure that the pictures they take are well exposed, with the right white balance and so forth - A RAW file lets you get it a little wrong and still get a good picture. From a quality viewpoint - JPEGs are smallest; TIFFs are (by a long way) the largest and RAWs (my favourite) have all the quality of a TIFF with a little extra flexibility to hide photographic mistakes. The biggest downfall of a RAW file is that it must be converted (to a TIFF, or a JPEG etc.) before it can be used by most image editing applications.

Tools to convert RAW files into normal image files

Adobe Photoshop 8 (CS) contains a good RAW file converter. Adobe Photoshop 7 could have a RAW converter added to it which worked well (if your camera wasn't a Fuji).

Most camera manufacturers make their own converters (Fuji Raw Converter EX, Canon File Viewer, etc) or you could choose to use a third party tool (Capture One, Breeze Browser, QImage, etc)

Can I just take the photos from the camera and publish them?

If the photo is well exposed, correctly coloured, has no areas you want to improve and is the size you want to publish - yes. If not, you'll need to manipulate the image. You could easily fill a book about image manipulation so I won't try too hard. I use Adobe Photoshop, it's expensive but good and you can get a free 30 day trial from the Adobe web site. I like: - Adobe Photoshop - JASC PaintShop Pro - Adobe Photoshaop Elements - Mediachance photbrush - Corel Photopaint

I'm sure there are lot's more but since I started with Photoshop I've been like a zealot.

White Balance

In a film camera, you put film based on the lighting around. You can get tungsten film for use under normal indoor lights, outdoor film for sunny days, outdoor film for overcast days, etc.

The same principle applies to a digital camera; it's called the white balance of a picture. It's called the white balance because if you have a plain white object in every picture and make sure it is white when you view the picture - every other colour will be right too.

Of course - you don't need to have a white object in every shot. If you're in an evenly lit room and you first photo is of a white object - every subsequent photo under those lights will be the same.

One of the best things about being able to change the white balance for every picture is that you can intersperse, say, infrared photos with all the others. With a film camera you took a film-full of infrared and then changed back.

Do I want an on-camera flash? As long as the camera has a hot-shoe as well.

You'll probably want to use free-standing flashes (often called strobes or hot lights) to light your pictures.

Most strobes have an infrared panel on them so an infrared emitter fitted to the camera hot-shoe will trigger the strobes to synchronise with the camera shutter.

Hot or strobe lights?

A hot light is a tungsten or halogen lamp. They're a lot dimmer than a strobe so need to be a lot more powerful to give off the same light. They also give off a lot of heat.

If you're taking pictures of ball bearings, you can be pretty sure they won't complain about the heat or wilt.

The same is not true of people, flowers, chocolates, etc.

The great thing about hot lights is that you can put the light in place and see for yourself exactly how the lighting looks before the picture is taken. With a strobe you only find out if the light is okay when the picture is taken.

As you become experienced as a photographer you will start to know how much light is right from a strobe. A hot light is easier to use for somebody less practiced.

Should I mix lighting?

NO!

Every light has a colour temperature measured in Kelvin. It ranges from roughly 2750-10000K Tungsten and halogen lights are usually around 3200K; fluorescent tube lights are 3800K; daylight is 5500K; outdoor shade is 7500K and strobes are 5500K.

There are sheets of gel available that can be placed over light to give them a different temperature. This is often done on indoor architectural pictures where gels are placed inside lampshades to make the light the same colour as the light through the windows.

Simply always use lights whose colour temperatures are the same or very similar in a particular photo.

Camera Choices

For the user aiming for quality look for a camera that produces uncompressed outputs (RAW or TIFF). A camera that produces RAW files will be faster to save pictures than one that produces TIFFs; it will also be a little more forgiving.

Here are the (non-dSLR) cameras I like. I'm certain there are many more that I've missed from this list, but these are the cameras I'd put on my shortlist:

Canon Powershot S40 Canon Powershot S50 Fujifilm Finepix S602Z Fujifilm Finepix S7000 Minolta Dimage A1 Sony DSC-828

There isn't really room to go through their features (that and I'm not a camera salesman) but suffice it to say they all have shutter and aperture priority, accept an external flash and all except the Canons can be focussed manually.

Other Equipment

Some other equipment that is vital (in my opinion) to product photography: - A good, sturdy tripod - Remote shutter release - it means you don't even have to touch the camera to take a picture. Your photos will get a lot sharper in an instant. - A macro arm (up to you, this is an arm that you place on top of your tripod in line with the subject. The camera fits to the top of the arm. Moving the camera is more accurate than moving the focus. Useful if you have a lot of small products to photograph.) - An IR emitter - if you have strobes to trigger them remotely. - Lighting (continuous or strobe) - A shooting table (optional. The table is covered with opaque, coloured perspex. If you shoot a lot of small items you can place them on this table and then position lights above, below, in front or behind. It makes your life much easier.) - Seamless backgrounds (just a white roll and a black roll to start with, more later) - Two memory cards (allows you to continue shooting while you empty the other card to your PC.) - A memory card reader

In the same way that photography is only a small part of taking commercial pictures; Equipment is only a small part of photography. It's a steep learning curve, but one worth climbing.