Fellow film-photo bloggers: how do you like to photograph your old cameras?
Reviewing old gear on this blog as I do, I need to show the cameras. When this blog was new a decade ago I’d just set them on my deck’s railing and aim my digital camera at them. But if I shot at midday or in the afternoon, the sun was overhead, leading to harsh shadows and bad reflections. If I shot late afternoon or in the evening, the sun was behind my subject, leading to silhouetting.
I had so much to learn. I shot handheld, and camera shake was a problem. And I shot my digital camera, a simple Kodak EasyShare Z730, at its default focal length of 33mm (equivalent). That led to my cameras looking a little off square.
Morning-only shooting was too limiting, so I brought it inside. I stuck cameras on a little table in my office and turned on every light in the room. I was still using Corel Paint Shop Pro to edit my photos, and I couldn’t adjust white balance with it.
It did help considerably when I upgraded my digital camera (Canon PowerShot S80) and put it on a tripod. Zooming in to about 50mm equivalent gave the cameras a more natural look. A switch to Photoshop Elements gave me more tools to make colors look natural.
It helped even more when I moved to my living room, opened the blinds on the big picture window, and shot cameras on the coffee table. The colorful backgrounds added interest. I also upgraded my digital camera again, to a Canon PowerShot S95. It can zoom directly to common focal lengths, including 50mm, no guessing. That feature is so useful.
Because the light varies, in automatic mode the camera sometimes gives me too little depth of field. So I switched to program mode and set ISO to 100 to get a slow enough shutter speed to bring all details in crisp. That sometimes left the shutter open so long that shake from pressing the button would ruin the shot. So I started using the self-timer to delay the shutter.
I don’t remember just what led me to switch to photographing cameras on my family room coffee table. I probably wanted to shoot a camera well after daylight had passed one day. My family room has the best artificial light in the house. I figured out how to position the camera so that only the coffee table’s surface served as a background, which I find to be a clean look.
When I shoot during the day, natural light from the nearby window renders the surface red-brown. At night, with every lamp in the room lit, the table looks dark brown. By not I had started shooting RAW, and I had upgraded to full Photoshop, for even greater control.
Photoshop can’t fix everything, though. With tall cameras I have to raise and tilt my camera such that the images look top heavy.
Half the time I forget to clean up the camera before I shoot it. I don’t notice the dust until I bring up the image in Photoshop. It’s enough hassle to set up to shoot these cameras that I just shrug and use the images anyway.
Keeping the coffee-table surface as the background sometimes leads me to shoot from angles that obscure some of the camera’s details. This Retina’s exposure scale is on the bottom of the lens barrel, not that you can tell it from this shot. The photo below, which I made in seconds with my iPhone, shows these details much better.
My camera photos work well enough to use in my reviews, but I’m hardly proud of them. So do tell: what tricks have you learned that give you fast, easy, inexpensive, but interesting photos of your gear?
