After you read this guide, please indicate whether it was helpful or not.

Please Note: This Guide owes credit to, and builds upon, another Guide, Ways to Photograph Sterling or Other Silver Items, by eBay user omiaqt3. That Guide was very useful to us and we simply add in this Guide a few more photography tips and illustrations.

Background

We agree with the Guide we referenced that background can affect the quality of picture. Here you see two pictures taken one right after the other with the same camera with the same settings. As we always set it up, the camera was set on a small tripod with no flash. The camera is a digital Nikon COOLPIX 4300, about five years old.

The fork on the left seems lighter and shows less detail than the fork on the right. We think this is because of the automatic light sensing capability of our camera. It averages all the light in the scene and allows more exposure time for the black background because the black background is not reflecting much light.

In the picture on the right, the camera receives much more light from the white background and when this is averaged in with the reflections from the fork, the camera determines that the exposure should be less or shorter. The result is that the fork's detail is clearer.

Modifying ISO Rating

We like the black background so we experimented with our camera a bit. It allows us to reduce the amount of light allowed in by way of a manual adjustment to the automatically calculated exposure time or f-stop. The camera is normally set to be equivalent to ISO 100 film. We can change this up to an equivalent rating of ISO 400. In the "analog" film world, the higher the ISO rating, the "faster" the film.

Below are two pictures similar to the two above but with the ISO set to 200. Note that the detail on the left fork is now a lttile more defined.

Post-Production Modification

Below you see two examples of the same photograph. The one on the left is the original photograph using an ISO rating of 400. Using Microsoft Office Picture Manager, a simple tool, we modified the picture on the left a bit after it was taken by decreasing the "brightness" by 10 points and increasing the "contrast" by 10 points. The result is a slightly more crisp image.

Finally, we took the picture on the right above and cropped it with Microsoft Office Picture Manager. This process increases the relative size of the remaining portion of the picture, thereby illustrating the fork better.

Reflection

The Guide we referenced discussed reflection. Here is another example of the toughest offenders - spoons! In the first picture, the camera was almost directly over the spoon. You can see the one foot of our little tripod at the lower left.

For the second picture, we reversed the position of the spoon and moved the camera over to the right, shooting at an angle back toward the spoon. There is a white wall not far away to the left of the spoon and most of the reflection is from that wall.

In the third picture, we used the same setup as for the second picture but we slid an object about one inch tall under the background cloth to elevate the handle of the spoon. This changed the reflection pattern again. We've not discovered a perfect way to remove all reflection (try a gravy ladle!) but we have been able to minimize it if we are not too lazy.

All three of these pictures were shot with an ISO rating of 200 and there was no post-production.

We hope these hints will help with your photography. We would like to hear about other hints.

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