Taking/Editing Pictures

My plan is to do a bit of “walk through” from camera to computer to CanDB, showing examples of my process. There are probably an infinite number of ways to take beer can pictures, my steps are definitely not the best, but a handful of points that will help ensure your time is better spent producing quality pictures:

· You must control the lighting. Ideally no glare, no bounce, no shadows, etc. I use a simple photobox with 60 watt incandescent bulb. The BCCA has an awesome photobox with carefully controlled overhead flash. There are examples of cloth photoboxes on EBay where light is provided from “outside” the cloth. The following picture is example of Rand Lindsay’s business setup. The more you control the light, the better your results.

· Use some form of neutral background, such as white, light gray, light blue, etc. Recommendation to not use black or other very dark colors

· Spend a few minutes reading about your digital camera. At minimum determine how to set “macro mode” since you will likely be taking pictures 12-14 inches away from given beer can. Many digital camera’s now have very good software such that you might be able to get away with simple “point and click” and “auto focus”, but experiment a bit before you spend hours on something you later want to throw away.

· Learn to do some basic photo editing. A very nice and affordable product is Adobe Photoshop Elements. Much cheaper than full blown Adobe Photoshop but most of the important features. At least learn how to crop your pictures and canvas size, and maybe to adjust brightness/contrast or to let Adobe adjust the colors or perform correction. Often my raw pictures don’t look correct but simple click on the “Auto Correction” menu item gets real close to natural, and more than good enough for my usage.

Figure 1 - Photo provided by Rand Lindsay

*** Walkthrough of my process to eventually be added here ***

http://www.mbcinfo.com/MBC/html/Misc/CameraBox.html

http://www.mbcinfo.com/MBC/html/Misc/CameraInfo.html