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Digital Photography
The web is a visual medium, and as such the quality of images is on your site is very important. Great photography can really enhance a site, but poor or even average photographs can make what could be a good-looking site lose much of its impact. Even if you are a competent photographer, taking pictures for websites – particularly product pictures for ecommerce sites – needs special consideration.
We would usually recommend product pictures, interior building shots and other specialist photography is done by a professional photographer. However, if you are determined to do it yourself there are a number of ways you can improve on the standard snap-shot.
Read through this guide to get some handy tips on lighting and photographing your subject.
Content
- Natural Light
- Studio Light
- Background
- Colour Temperature
- Exposure
- Focus
- Depth of Field
- Shutter Speed
It is rarely a good idea to use a flash unless you know what you’re doing. A camera’s built-in flash will flatten an image because light will be thrown straight on at the subject. This will make your images look unnatural, and may cause ugly shadows and reflections on your subject. If you have enough available light, it is worth keeping your flash turned off unless you really need it. Most cameras will overcompensate and turn on the flash automatically when you may not need it at all.
In order to use natural light effectively you should pay attention to the way shadows are falling on the subject or scene you are capturing. If you are photographing a person for example, shadows will make a huge difference – a hard light to the side of the face may cast an ugly shadow behind the nose which could ruin your image. If you can’t control the quality and position of your light source, try experimenting with different camera angles or move your subject. To avoid lens flares and overexposure, always make sure your light source (e.g. the sun) isn’t pointing directly at your camera.
With studio lighting you will have full control over the strength, position and quality of your light source. But this also means you have a lot more decisions to make when shooting your perfect image, so be prepared to experiment for longer before you settle on a set of images you are happy with.
Make sure you use a bright lamp to light your subject – a couple of cheap halogen worklights (350 watts or more) from your local DIY shop will do the trick. Bear in mind that halogen lights will cast a yellowish colour over your subject, which you will need to take into account when setting up your camera or editing your image. See below for more information on colour temperature.
A small light tent is indispensable for lighting your subject, especially a metallic object like a piece of jewellery. A light tent is essentially a cube of translucent material, which your object is placed inside. When a light is shone through the material it is diffused, which means it is spread evenly around your object and prevents hard shadows and unwanted detail in reflections.
In most cases you will want to avoid a busy background, especially in product shots where unwanted detail can distract from your subject.
If you are shooting in a studio environment, you will have full control over your background. Use a plain piece of card or material to ensure that your background is clear. You may want a standard black or white background, but if you intend to extract your images in photoshop later, you may choose to use a bright colour that contrasts with your subject to make it easier to cut out. This won’t work so well with reflective objects, because the reflections will be coloured!
If you are shooting down on your subject and you need your background to be completely white, it may be a good idea to invest in a cheap lightbox to light your image from below.
Here’s a good tip to keep unwanted detail out of your product shots. In order to prevent a ‘join’ where the backdrop meets the floor, use a curved sheet of card to place behind your object. This is called an infinity curve because, if you get it right, it will look like the white background behind your object extends forever.
‘White’ light is very rarely true white. Your eyes will trick you into thinking that you are seeing neutral white light when you are probably seeing a slightly blue or yellow light, depending on where it is coming from. For example, Outdoors light will have a slight blue cast, and light from a bulb will have an orange/yellow cast.
Digital camera sensors are not as clever as the human eye; if the settings on your camera are not set properly, you may see a strong colour cast on the images you have taken. It is possible to set most cameras to AWB (auto white balance), which will guess what temperature the light is, but in most cases it is better to set it yourself if you know you are only using one type of light. This will ensure that all your shots are consistent in colour.
If you are using halogen lights or standard lightbulbs for your photography, set your camera’s white balance to ‘tungsten’, or set it to ‘fluorescent’ if you are using strip lights.
If you are taking photos outdoors, set your white balance to ‘daylight’, ‘shade’ or ‘cloudy’ depending on what the weather’s like.
The key to good photography is correct exposure. If your photos are underexposed, images will be muddy and dark. If they are overexposed, you will lose detail in shadows. It is possible to correct exposure to a certain extent afterwards, but unless you take care when you take the shot your image may be irreparable.
If you’re taking images outdoors, try to make a compromise between correctly exposing the sky and the ground. This can be tricky because your camera can only guess the exposure for one area of the image. On most compact digital cameras you can change the ‘exposure compensation’ – keep experimenting until you’ve found an image that you are happy with. One thing to remember is that the camera will very rarely take a perfect image on automatic settings. Your judgement is a lot more reliable.
If you are taking product photos, you may find that your images are blurred if you are too close to the object you are photographing. This is because your subject is out of your camera’s focal range. If you need to take lots of photos of small objects such as jewellery, it may be worth investing in a macro lens – these lenses have a greater focal range and will allow you to zoom in further to your subject.
If you are using a large aperture (see below), make sure that you’re focusing on something interesting in the shot, because some of the image may be out of focus.
Depth of field is basically the range of areas in your image that will be in focus. This will be determined by the aperture size (how wide your camera’s shutter will open when a photo is taken). The wider it opens, the more details in your image will be out of focus. If you are using a more advanced camera like a digital SLR, you will be able to change this setting yourself. Read your camera’s user manual to find out how to do this.
For promotional images and product shots, it is better to keep your depth of field as wide as you can, to keep as much of the image in focus as possible.
If your camera lets you change this yourself, you should set this to at least 1/125sec if you are taking handheld photographs. If you are using a camera set to auto, it will very likely slow the shutter speed down if there is not enough light in the image. This will cause blurry images if you are holding the camera yourself. Unless you are taking images in bright daylight, you will probably benefit from using a tripod to steady your camera.
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