Digital Camera

[LinuxRandal]

WoodTurner,

I echo what CWS said. I could get better close-up details of the finish on my pens and even see the wood cells in some cases with my Canon EOS (Almost Rebel equivalent) that I can't get on point and shoot. This was not as much for photo presentations and prints as it was for the details of the pen and finish. IN certain light, minute' swirls or scratches could barely be seen by the naked eye on a fine finished pen. And these were especially noticeable with a 2x or 4x loupe. When making pens that sell from $500 - $1000, one wants a flawless finish. A good camera can take photos of the flaws. I haven't seen a point and shoot that can do that on a consistent basis.

I am sure there are other needs of fine or precise photos. Another aspect is that point and shoot distorts things on the edge (vertically) where as a good lens will compensate or prevent that distortion. I don't know the correct term. Probably today, there may be P&S cameras that has fixed those aberrations.

How about a discussion of lighting here.
A lot of the point and shoot cameras don't have mounting for filters or macro lights, where the DSLR's and the hybrid all in one things do. (currently looking for macro light for my Lumix FZ70)

[cwsmith]

Lighting would be a pretty good subject and one in which I don't think of myself as being an expert at. As the guy with the camera in my plant, I'd pretty much leave the product presentation stuff to the Ad agency, as there was no way I could justify the lighting setups that those people would come to the plant with. Huge seamless materials for backgrounds and their supporting structures, large battery/flash charge packs, reflecting umbrella's, and several cameras of different formats.

For me, it was my trusty 35mm SLR, a flash with a swivel/bounce head, one slave, and when necessary a tripod. But I was shooting for technical communications like instruction manuals, training, and management presentions; not for advertising. My advantage was my technical illustration background, where I knew what was necessary to show and I could go out into the manufacturing area and shoot without a lot of interference to the machining or assembly processes. Just go out there and get the job done and not waste a lot of time with it or interfere with getting the product out the door on schedule.

Compressor's in my plant were huge... rail car-sized stuff and bigger. The kind of compressors that go out on a platform or into a petro-chem plant or pipeline.

For macro photography, I used a tripod or, more often, my copy stand. There I would use flood lights as they are much easier to see. For flat work, like artwork you want the light to be well balanced and even across the surface of the piece. With film, color of the light was quite important and therefore you had to buy the correct film (so to, when shooting color in the shops... always a challenge because of the liabilities from one shop area to the next (various kinds of florescent's in the office, tungsten-iodine or high-intensity incandescence, and a couple of others that I don't recall at the moment. It was much easier when shooting black and white. For 3-dimensional pieces in macro, you want to have some variability in light strength... moving some of the light back from the subject to show depth.

That was one of the problems I used to have with contracting local photographers. We only had two in the area, back in the 70's and both would approach the subject differently. One would come in and set up several umbrellas and the subject compressors would come out very flat looking, hardly any shadow or highlight. The other fellow would come in with his slaved flash units; stark and harsh they'd present all kinds of dark shadows and super highlights. Whatever the results, we'd spend a fortune with an airbrush artist having them retouched.

For those reasons, I prefer to photograph in natural lighting whenever it's possible.

CWS

[Rslaugh]

Since selling my 36’ project sailboat I have invested most of my free time in getting back into photography, primarily fashion and pinup style. Lighting is everything. Natural light can be great but is hard to control and constantly changing. My lighting kit has really grown over the past 2 years, going from two shoe mount units which could be used off camera with a remote trigger to a total of 5 similar lights and I really only use one of those very much anymore - Godox V1 roundhead, usually places behind the model as a hair or rim light. I also have two Godox AD200 pro and just got a Godox AD600 pro. I shoot mostly in manual and the Godox remote allows me to control all the lights separately allowing you to really dial in a lighting setup.

Flash by itself is a really harsh light so I have a number of different size and shaped soft boxes with removable egg rates and umbrellas. These are key to softening and controlling the light.