Making Your Photos More Interesting

Friday, December 2, 2011

Making your Photos More Interesting

     Right now, most of my photography is for e-Bay. I then take the photos and talk either about old toys, or for this blog, learning more about photography, and taking better photos.

    I was photographing a new group of toys, when I decided to talk about making photos a bit more interesting. So let's get straight into this episode. I'll be talking mostly about using items for reference size, and stronger lighting.

My Typical E-Bay Composite Photo.

A composite photo, for those who may not be familiar with the term,

simply means a photo made up of several photos.

The gray fabric was used as a neutral tone. 

My Slightly-Better Photo for E-Bay.

I bought a few new fabrics, and the American 1 cent coin is placed in the photo

for size reference.

For this photo, I decided to use my IMac keyboard.

Everyone certainly knows the approximate size of the keys and keyboard, so why not use this as an ABS.

I invented the term ABS which is an acronym for "anything but seamless"

Seamless paper are the long rolls  4' x 36' (1.2M x 10.5M) that photographer use for

catalogue photography. The paper is 1 length and when you make a slight bend in it, creates a sense of infinite depth, since there is no corner or edge to tell the viewer where the back ends.

Filling the background with other toys helps to make the photo more interesting.

However, I controlled the light and used a shallow lens opening (f 5.6).

That combination helped to keep the centre-of-attention on the truck and cab, which are are the items being sold on E-Bay.

How about modifying the light?

In the above example, I took my IKEA pen holder and placed it in front of the light.

Since I use small spot lights which cast harsh shadows, I was able to create that mesh-like pattern.

Any item (a coloured glass bottle, a piece of cardboard with a pattern, and so forth will work as well. 

You can see the IKEA pen holder in the upper left corner.

These are small magnets about 1 1/2" in diameter (4 cm).

That conversion from Imperial (American) to Metric certainly keeps my brain active!

A pair of sport sunglasses.

THe red/blue colour theme works well, the glasses remove some empty space (the fabric), and the sunglasses act as a reference to the size of the toy.

Another variation of the Sunglasses.

Once you are photographing something, why not try as many variations as you can before you "get tired" of using the item.

By the way, the glasses in photography are called a "prop".

A "prop" is simply an accessory item in a photograph that makes the photo more interesting, but does not distract from the main item. In this case, the main item is the toy Tootsietoy car.

And 1 final photo for this instalment.

The diameter of the DVD is 4 11/16" or 120 mm.

I can certainly see why metric in this measurement certainly is the best system for measurement of a DVD!

I would like to thank all of you for visiting this new site.

My readership is starting to escalate to roughly about 20 page views/day.

I still can't figure out if that's 20 people viewing this site, or 1 person reading 20 pages!

In any case, I appreciate all of you for dropping by!

Thank you!

You'll have noticed that I changed the font size and colour.

A viewer, and  my wife mentioned reading the material was hard on the eyes.

As a result, I've enlarged the size of the font, and changed the colour from red to white. 

Any Comments?