Pictures Of Your Works

[blazt*]

Thanks for pointing that out, vodkaman. It was starting to drive me nuts.

This is for the poster and anybody else.

Ok...now that I've seen your pic I'm going to say you need to use the spot meter if your cam has that option. It looks like what happened here is that the background, which is darker than your lures, forced the camera to overexpose and fire the flash. Flash is usually bad unless you can control the direction and intensity, and there is lots of glare on your lures. I'd kill the flash and put the cam on a tripod or stack of books. Use the spot meter and aim the crosshairs (so to speak) at the lure, avoiding kill spots and other black areas on the bait.

Here is a pic I took of rusty, slightly banged up crank with center weighted metering:

Same shot with spot metering:

The background is underexposed, (too dark) but this makes the lure "glow" with contrast. Also I put my cam in portrait mode, which blurs the background somewhat by opening up my lens. My lens is slow; a faster lens will defocus the background even more. This is good; it makes the lure stand out. I wish I had payed more attention to composition, though, because the beaver - chopped sapling is a bit too much to take.

Two more examples, taken in macro, portrait, spot meter, no flash modes:

In the above, I hung the lure on a crappy looking , worn out tackle bag and placed an opened up bag of Doritos, Mylar side out, on the left side of the lure. By spot metering I underexposed the background, hiding the worn out fabric. Also makes the bait "levitate".

The cam I used is an ebay special - 5 megapixel Sanyo point and shoot I got for like 10 bucks. The menu is relatively primitive. I've had it for a little over a week...think I can maybe get better pics with a little more practice...

[dhockey11]

Thanks for pointing that out, vodkaman. It was starting to drive me nuts.

This is for the poster and anybody else.

Ok...now that I've seen your pic I'm going to say you need to use the spot meter if your cam has that option. It looks like what happened here is that the background, which is darker than your lures, forced the camera to overexpose and fire the flash. Flash is usually bad unless you can control the direction and intensity, and there is lots of glare on your lures. I'd kill the flash and put the cam on a tripod or stack of books. Use the spot meter and aim the crosshairs (so to speak) at the lure, avoiding kill spots and other black areas on the bait.

Here is a pic I took of rusty, slightly banged up crank with center weighted metering:

Same shot with spot metering:

The background is underexposed, (too dark) but this makes the lure "glow" with contrast. Also I put my cam in portrait mode, which blurs the background somewhat by opening up my lens. My lens is slow; a faster lens will defocus the background even more. This is good; it makes the lure stand out. I wish I had payed more attention to composition, though, because the beaver - chopped sapling is a bit too much to take.

Two more examples, taken in macro, portrait, spot meter, no flash modes:

In the above, I hung the lure on a crappy looking , worn out tackle bag and placed an opened up bag of Doritos, Mylar side out, on the left side of the lure. By spot metering I underexposed the background, hiding the worn out fabric. Also makes the bait "levitate".

The cam I used is an ebay special - 5 megapixel Sanyo point and shoot I got for like 10 bucks. The menu is relatively primitive. I've had it for a little over a week...think I can maybe get better pics with a little more practice...

Thanks to blazt and everyone else for their help. I will get to the pics as soon as I can, but it will probably be about a week before I can. I plan on trying pretty much everything mentioned here, and posting pics for comparison. Went fishing with the baby bass painted ones, and had a 15-18lb king salmon follow it to within inches of the boat. I almost died, I would have surely lost the bait, so I couldn't take more pictures of it. =)

Thanks again,

Zack

[dhockey11]

So I got together a really simple box, adjusted the camera, and followed the editing instructions for Photoshop. The biggest difference seemed to come from the photo box lighting, but some was found adjusting this setting on the camera from 1/500 to 1/1500. Not sure what the heck that does, but the picture looked a lot crisper. I attached two pics for comparison.

Thanks guys,

Zack

[CNC Molds N Stuff]

When I was selling a bunch of old motorcycle parts on Ebay I set up a little photo studio. I took two piece of white shelf board and screwed them together to form a base and a backdrop. Then I set my digital camera on a mini tripod. What seemed to work the best was to set the camera on macro, but back off to about 6 feet and zoom (optical zoom not digital zoom) in on the part. It worked really well, and I didn't have anybody complain about the parts I sent. They got exactly what was in the picture and it was a good picture.

For fishing lures I might do somethign similar, but it would depend on the particular lure how I took its picture. A spinner bait I might snap hanging on a line in front of the backdrop, and then just copy the backdrop over the line and rotate the image for displaying it. A worm I would probably lay out carefully on the base and shoot straight down at. A crank bait I might hold up with a hemostat in a mini vise against the backdrop, and then just edit out the hemostat. Lures with lots of white and light colors I might setup in front of a black backdrop.

You can play with lighting easily. Often a flash will create bright spots or washed out colors. Instead I prefered to position halogen work lamps to illuminate my parts making sure I didn't get an angle that put a glare into the lense.

[blazt*]

Is that the same lure?! That's 200% better for sure. The 1/500th you were asking about would be the shutter speed.

[Vodkaman]

Your camera is probably shutter priority, which means you control the shutter speed and the camera adjusts the aperture to suit.

Increasing the speed forces the camera to open the aperture wider. By doing this, you reduce your depth of field. This means the range of in-focus depth is reduced. If you are aiming straight on, then this is not a problem, but if you doing a fancy oblique angle, you may lose the tail end, depending on what point you focus. The depth of field also makes sure that nothing in the background interferes with your composition, by blurring it out.

Those speeds seem very fast. Maybe I am just out of touch with the technology.

The pic is great.

Dave

[dhockey11]

Thanks guys, it is the same lure. The picture is way better. I plan on trying to get a better camera that has more control settings and trying it some more to compare. All of the advice here worked well though.