Featured Photographing your antiques

Modern digital cameras are wonders of science and manufacture but still the horrible picture often features all over the internet, from ebay sellers to the occasional forum question.

One thing that always puzzles me is why, when users see their picture that appear to painted in mud on the other side of an opaque glass door, they don't go back and do it better.

It has gradually dawned on me that possibly they simply do not know how. As someone who has been taking pictures since slightly after Fox-Talbot, the mysteries of focus, film speed , lighting, aperture, depth of focus and shutter speed and composition, and how all these factors interact has become pretty well second nature.

For the benefit of the people who point and shoot, here are a few tips about what is going on and how to get better results.

You do not need an expensive camera, but for anything except what might be called general scenery, averagely lit objects at average distances, your non camera camera will struggle.

It is almost always the case that with pictures of your antiques and art, some understanding and special effort is needed. I am going to assume the user has a modestly priced pocket digital camera with typical modern facilities. These include automatic focus and automatic selection of shutter speed and aperture. Most have some form of colour compensation so artificial light and daylight produce about the same results.

The first thing is LIGHT. Just because you can see the object, it does not mean your camera can, or at least, not well. It will have a jolly good try at it, and you'll get results that work fine for a group portrait at a party, but fall down sadly for a teacup on a table.

The first reason is focus. Automatic focus cameras can have a problem in dim light getting a sharp focus. Some have a special light for this, but the cure is really MORE LIGHT. Associated with the lack of light problem is depth of focus and camera shake.

To compensate for low light the camera lens opens to its widest setting (smallest f-stop) and also selects a slow shutter speed to collect more light. The large aperture means that only a relatively thin slice of the object is actually in focus, and the slow speed (long exposure) means that the camera can move during the time the light is coming in, causing blurring. Finally, the film speed selected will be the electronic equivalent of coarse grain camera film, very fast but with lots of 'noise' giving poor definition.

No problem, you say, the automatic flash will take care of all that. Well, yes and no. Automatic is for the average scene. Try close up stuff and you get the horrible flash burn where a lot of the flash is reflected straight back at the lens. The result is the familiar underexposure of the surroundings and a useless white glare in the middle.

All pictures with flash burn should be deleted immediately and a better solution found.

The answer is always. more light. If you cannot go outdoors in daylight find somewhere well lit indoors, preferably with daylight. Do not attempt to shoot against the light, say with an item on a windowsill, as the camera will expose for the outside light and your object will be underexposed and dark.

If you just have to use artificial light, work at it. Set up a couple of table lamps and some white cloths to reflect and soften this light. Experiment to see what looks good in the final image. We no longer have to wait a week to get the results back, so shoot, look and try again takes seconds.
Those meaningless numbers in the viewfinder or on the screen should be something like f-4 and 1/100 as a minimum.

After arranging more light, work on less clutter. Unless you are taking a picture of clutter, avoid it. A grey or other pale neutral colour cloth or other material is a good plain background. Beige is good. About all it is good for.
Avoid white or black unless you understand exactly how to get your camera to calculate exposure based on the item only. Most cameras, unless otherwise instructed, will use the whole scene to calculate exposure, so a white background means your item will be underexposed (too dark) and a dark background means your item will be too light or overexposed. A strongly coloured surround will cause a colour tint from reflected light, so avoid them.

Many items are pretty small, so getting in close to get the details is important. Even cheap cameras usually have a Macro or closeup setting, usually a little flower symbol.

You may need to refer to your manual for this, for example my Lumix has to be on the widest zoom setting (wide angle) before using the macro function. Not obvious.
It is with close up work that light is most important, all the problems of the out of focus picture will come back magnified. A simple tripod or other camera support, even resting your hands firmly on something is a great help. Waving the camera about at arms length unsupported may be fine for daylight snapshots but it is useless for good detail pictures.

When finally you have your pictures, remember that post production comes next, not just upload and done.

Your camera will have come with some form of photo processing software, or you can get a free program off the internet, such a Picasa.

Take your newly taken pictures and run them through a few simple editing processes.
The first essential is 'Crop'. It is unlikely your picture is framed as closely as you'd like, we do not need to see half your room in the background, so use the Crop function to outline and select just the important part of the image and lose the rest.

That may well be all you need to do. However, if your picture lacks contrast (white and black both look grey) a touch of auto-contrast can work wonders. There is no need at all for pictures that do not look as good as the original item, not all pictures need to look as if you have cataracts and are seeing everything through a brown murky filter.

At this stage you can make make a fair assessment of your picture as 'Rubbish', delete it and go back and do it better. I am not ashamed to say I often do this myself. You can even make other people's pictures better with image processing.

Assuming it is acceptable, and I'd say acceptable would be something you'd not be surprised to see published in a magazine, the last stage is prepare for the internet, assuming that is what you want your pictures for.

The raw image, or JPG format image off your camera may be as much as 10 megabytes in filesize. That is way too big to use. The big file size has plenty of uses but for the internet, a file size more like 200 KB or so is reasonably quick to upload and for users to download, and fits the average monitor or laptop screen with comfort and no loss of resolution. For simplicity, say 1000 pixels across.

Your picture editing program will have a resize function, so use it to resize and store your pictures before uploading. In Picasa it is an obscure camera icon marked EXPORT, botton just right of centre, and is harder to find than it should be. In other programs resize may be a choice in the 'image' or 'edit' menu.

The most expensive gear will not make a bad photographer good. The only way to do that is to have some understanding of what is going on, and there are plenty of simple camera books to explain it. You get back in results the effort you put in. Be conscious of the process and you can do great work with the cheapest modern camera.

It's the photographer who makes the picture, not the device used.

Get the knowledge. Use the power.

 

For post processing, I'd recommend Irfanview. I've been using it for years. Lightweight and free.

 

Wonderful, AF -- Thank you. Now all I have to do is to remember all of this.

 

Crop. Damnit.

 

When I purchased my new camera, I signed up for a Photography class at the Community Center. It was taught by a photographer for the local newspaper. I did OK for awhile, but seem to have forgotten most of what I learned, although instructions on how to use my new camera seems to have mostly stuck.

The photography part of selling on ebay is for me the most time consuming, hair pulling task of the entire process. There are days when I'm ready to chuck the whole idea because of the photography. For instance, I still can't seem to figure out how to take decent pictures of clear glass. My house must be situated oddly on the lot, because none of my windows supply the proper amount of light. I have a "light box" but that seems under lighted to me as well. I've put in more powerful light bulbs but that doesn't work either.

Any tips on getting good clear crystal glass photos? I have dozens of boxes of EAPG wine and cordial goblets to sell, but they're still sitting here because I can't do the photos at all well.

 

I must admit that I have never tried to photograph glass, so I have no good tips, but I expect some others will have advice.

 

I've used black backdrops in the past when taking photos of uranium glass lit with blacklight. Might be worth trying as it seems to concentrate the light in the glass and makes focusing fairly easy. But maybe a proper glass photographer can advise.

 

I'll admit I will often not bid on an eBay item because I can't tell if it's chipped, crazed or cracked. AND have often been ignored or received a poor response by the seller. I'll also admit to a few other quirks.
My early photography class was junior year in high school where we learned to make our own cameras out of cardboard boxes. A bit more complicated to use, but cheaper than the Kodak Brownie.
I quit the last adult ed. class because I wanted to learn a bit more about my Pentax settings, which lens to put on when, etc. and the instructor preferred to show techniques of developing black and white photos.
AND yes, I will spend 2 hours preparing an eBay listing, half of which is getting the best pictures possible. 90% of my sales have been glass, thankfully mostly color or opaque. CRYSTAL GLASS ADDS ANOTHER HOUR. The only way I have found to get a decent clear glass pic is to place it near a window with ambient light hitting in from the side or preferably rear. Use a BLACK background and take LOTS of pics to be sure at least a few are usable without shadows or reflections.
All other glass is set in my homemade light box. Side light filtered through white tissue paper on two sides. 60 watt Sylvania daylight bulbs. Backgrounds differ using poster boards ranging from white, through blue, red, gray and black. And my camera (NO FLASH) always sits on the 4 inch high tripod with a ten second delay.

I won't bore you with the after photo editing because I don't want to admit it's only done after loading the floppies into my second computer which runs on Vista.

 

Andy McConnell and Mark Hill have both written about photographing glass and are superb at it. Let me see if I can find the articles.

 

Taking pictures of glass is extremely difficult for me too. Sometimes I will have a lucky day where I get some good shots right away that I can fix up with editing, but most of the time I take so many pics to insure I get a few I can use. I am never really happy with any of them.

I take pics mostly in my kitchen at a certain time of day in the morning because the sunlight comes in just right.
Lots of photo editing follows. I use picmonkey.com, the free version.
I loathe the photography part of listing more than I dislike packing things up for shipping. :-(

 

Sometimes shooting from shadow into light can do the trick with clear glass. These pictures were taken with the bowl on a shelf by the inside of a large window:





pearls: Isn't it strange... the photography is the part I like best.

BTW: these pictures were taken with a 2 megapixel Nikon Coolpix fully automatic camera.

 

Moreotherstuff, your photographs have always been top drawer. From the ebay boards to what you post here, I admire your skills so much. You have such a natural talent and it shows.

 

Thank you. I'm blushing.

 

Motherstuff, fantastic. That's what I've tried - getting the light to come in from the back of the glass. But not always doable. Your second picture is/should be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Will you share your secret on that one?

 

I have a wonderful Hysteria smoke glass vase that I just can't photograph. It's a low free-form vase, and it looks like a black lump no matter what I try.

I think I need a light table, which is not in the budget. I'm going to try to rig one up with a 2 light shop light, a clear plastic bin lid, and a photo cube (on my list of things to do).

 

It's true that I do a lot of editing to my photos, but here's the picture as it came out of the camera (resized only).


The glass was in shadow and I was shooting through it to clear sky. There really wasn't a whole lot of editing necessary.

 

We add around 200 new listings a month, each needing several photos, so photographing Ebay items has to be a production line affair for us. Usually front, sides, back, base and top + close ups of faults, quick image editing to ensure colours and white balance ok, straighten and crop.

As it is the average new listing still takes at least 15 minutes and often more

 

OK, Motherstuff, it's obvious you enjoy it. That's likely what does it. I can't come close perhaps because I start with a negative attitude.
But if you ever decide you want a sideline it should be fun and profitable taking pictures for glass sellers. Congratulations on your pics. Terrific.

cartoongirl My 24 x 20 x 16 light box cost about $1.99. Cardboard boxes are free and white tissue (wrapping) paper is at the dollar store for, guess what, one dollar for 50 sheets. I had the lamps and bulbs. I forget what I did with the 99 cents.

Look anything like this?

 

Daylight is my only lighting. It's manageable for about half the year. The other half, everything starts looking red. This is because, during winter, the best light of the day is still no better than early morning in the middle of summer. If you've noticed this problem, it can be somewhat alleviated by shooting when there is a light overcast. The cloud seems to filter out some of the red.

If you have a partially cloudy day, it can be interesting to photograph an object in bright sunlight, wait for cloud shadow and photograph it again, then compare the results for color balance.

 

You have nailed it further photographer extraordinaire. ​

Now long retired with nothing to do, I find that's what I get done. Nothing!.

Therefore when the need arises to take some pictures I no longer have the ability to wait for the natural light. I HAVE TO DO IT NOW OR IT WON'T GET DONE. Hence my light-box. Finally had a reason to build one six months ago. Actually works great. Unless, of course, it's clear crystal. Then the frustrations set in.

My extra computer still sits next to me because I became proficient in the 1998 version of ArcSoft photo editing. Takes me a few minutes to crop, transform, airbrush, enhance and add text if wanted. That version incompatible on the new computer.The newest ArcSoft version sits on the computer on which I'm now typing. Too complicated for an oldguy. And I'll hand you what is no longer embarrassing.

I CANNOT FIND and learn how to use A BETTER CAMERA THAN MY 1998 SONY MAVICA. My Pentax and it's ton of accessories for years accompanied me around a good part of the world but my Mavica, originally used for my work, paid back its initial cost every three months for several years. I'm not even sure where my Pentax is right now. I may have given it away.

Sure, I'm tech savvy !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HAH!!! HAH, HAH !!!!!!!!!!!! I posted questions and pics on a new "forum" I started about an hour ago. I think I lost it while trying to get it running.
Sheesh!