Discover new mode in your camera for your product pictures

If you are not satisfied with your Macro settings pictures so maybe it’s time to experiment with something else.
I personally had difficulties to take my pictures on contrast background, specifically pearls on black fabric. Also, I had problems to catch flashes in stones like labradorite for instance.

Since, I have never heard other suggestions but Macro setting so I was constantly annoying my husband blaming wrong settings/lightbox/camera/lamps and etc. Well, I had to have someone to blame. He helped me a lot with that, since he had good knowledge in this matter.

So one day he decided to try AV setting in out Cannon Power Shot S70 camera. Wow, results were amazing. You don’t have to be that close to your item. With 5 or more Mega Pixels you can always crop your image with no harm to quality.

Here it goes:

AV or A (AV in Cannon and A in Nikon).

AV or A mode determines whether all the photograph is in focus or part of. Like you can choose to have a sharp foreground and background, or you can blur the background. If you have SLR camera aperture is indicated by F-number value. The higher the F number, the greater depth of field of the photo that will be in focus. In other words, the higher F-number the smaller the hole in camera lens. You can see what aperture your digital camera is set at by looking at the back LCD screen for a F number. To understand that better I would recommend refer to your camera user manual guide to find out how to change F-number for your camera. The best way to understand how aperture works is to take numerous photographs with different f-number values and see what the difference is.

Shutter Speed.

You also need to understand what shutter speed is. In my case my camera determines stutter speed automatically. In theory shutter speed is amount of time a digital cameras shutter is held open for when taking a photograph. Shutter speed allows light to reach the cameras image sensor.Depending on your camera you will need to point your sensor on the brightest spot of your item. Again you have to refer to your camera user guide to find out how to change shutter speed and experiment with different settings to see the difference.

ISO Number.

ISO denotes how sensitive the image sensor is to the amount of light present. The higher the ISO, the more sensitive the image sensor. This increase in sensitivity does not come free. There is a price to pay with your image appearing more noisy. ISO speed affects the shutter speed / aperture combinations you can use to obtain correct exposure.
If you set your digital camera to a low ISO, for example 100, the resulting photograph will be less noisy than one set at 1600. Therefore go for a low ISO number whenever possible.

Don’t forget.

Have proper lightening in well constructed light box.
Always use tripod.
Set white balance.

Enjoy.

Now look at this necklace photographed in Macro and AV mode. Finally I got labardoriote flashy stones shown.

AV Setting



Macro Setting