Photographing your Collection, Part 2: The Setting -Your Studio. - By: Bill Harvey

YOUR STUDIO
This is a big can’o-worms. No need to pull out the gold-card though. Perhaps the most important piece of equipment you need might be nothing more then a large north-facing window. Add a table or desk top, and some butcher paper and you are in business.
Or trick things up with a cheap vinyl roll-up type window shade nailed up on the wall above the table-top and you can set up or tear down your studio in seconds. Make it wider then the stuff you want to shoot and long enough to pull down behind the stuff and drape it over the table-top. Makes for what is called a seem-less background But get it one size bigger then you think you will need it though -trust me on this.


LIGHTS:
Here is where we get out from under the flash. It may well be that the big old window will do the trick. Or go outside and do it there. But do it on the north side of the building. Direct sun -from the south- won’t get it -too grarie and harsh. Or do it on an overcast day. There are photographers that love the soft even light from a cloudy day.
There is much to be said for simple light-bulbs -old fashioned incandescent or high-efficiency-fluorescent -makes no never-mind. But use all the same kind. Your software can correct the overall color but it’s considerably more difficult to correct the blue light on one side and yellow on the other. More on software later.

A pair of $5.00 clamp-on reflector type from the hardware store work great. Pull up a couple of tall kitchen chairs, clamp the lights to the top, position then to either side of your set-up and you are in business. Whole books have been written on how to position your lights for dramatic effects. Back-light to make her hair glow, front light to make her stand out against a black background, light from below to make her look exotic. High to the right, low from the left. Who knows. Do what looks good to your eye. There is one place where you might want to take a little extra effort. Shiny sparkly things appreciate a.....


LIGHT TENT:
A light tent is nothing more then the means of diffusing light all around what ever you want to photograph. The key here is that it SURROUNDS your objects. Let’s assume you are taking pix of jewelry. What you need is a frame to go over the top, both sides, and back and holding some sort of diffusing material. You use your two reflectors clipped onto your kitchen caairs. As to the diffusing material, one photographer I read suggested a pillow case. Make a frame out of unbent clothes hangers and duct-tape. Then use scotch-tape to cover it with a few layers of wax paper. Or make a fancy folding / unfolding thing out of thin translucent sheet-plastic. Or find a good sized cardboard box, cut out the middle of each side and have at it with spray adhesive and thin white fabric or marker paper. A dozen ways to get’er done.
If the objects you are shooting are small enough, it may be that you can tape up a cone out of a large piece of paper, cut a hole in the front to take your pictures through, and you are in business. You are simply looking to get large translucent surfaces on a few sides of the thing you want to photograph. Your digital camera will sort out the exposure for you if you give it just a little help with the lights and tent.

YOUR COMPUTER:
You might think I'm belaboring the obvious when I suggest that your computer must be a part of this, but the single handiest thing you might do to make your "studio" work well is to either move your computer to your studio or move your studio close to your computer. My "studio" -the far end of a big desk with a vinyl window shade on the wall above- sits right next to my computer and I load, PhotoShop, LABEL, and file the pictures as soon as I take them. Useful enough for me when I take 5 or 10 pictures at a time, but if you are documenting a life-time of collecting -let's say just a few hundred- items, this degree of convenience is going to go a long way to support accuracy, completeness, and ultimately, your SANITY.


SOFTWARE:
Another can of worms, this. I have to admit that my own studio technique -fair to partly to begin with- has gotten a little sloppy ever since I got the good software (PhotoShop) and took a class on how to use the stuff. It seems my camera and scanner both came with some photo-retouch software that I never bothered to open and now the CD’s are long gone so I can’t comment too well on what you might have to do to tweak your pix. I might also mention that almost all of my work is to go online, and may not be the best way to go if you do the print thing. None-the-less, here is what I typically do when I’ve got pictures off / out of the camera and loaded into my ‘puter. (This applies to Adobe's PHOTOSHOP.)

#1. From Photoshop's menu, I to do Image, Adjustments, Brightness and Contrast. Sometimes I also bend the color a little one way or the other. Pay particular attention to the Shadows / Mid-tones / Highlights buttons as you adjust your colors.

#2 Crop and resize. Because I do it for my web-site. most of my pix are 300 pixels wide and I let the height go wherever it needs to go. Or I do them 300 high and let the width follow along proportionally. Sometimes -for the money-shot at the top of the page for example, I go 500 wide and do thumbnails 100 or 150 wide.

#3. Sometimes I select specific parts of the picture to fuss up a little. The selecting function is way beyond the scope of our needs, but burning and dodging often is worth your time,. But go at it gradually -10 - 20% strength and use a soft edge '"brush."

#4. If you do a lot of rectangular things like I do -tables and drawer-cases etc, you might want to fiddle around with the Edit, Transform, Skew function to straighten up the sides of things.

#5. Only after the pix is sized I do my sharpening. Rarely do I sharpen more the once and truth-to-tell, I’m not smart enough to do the Unsharp Mask thing, but I’ve heard really good PhotoShoppers insist it’s the only way to go. Here again, I think this might be more important for the internet then it is for prints.

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS:
1. If your collection is real valuable, consider hiring a pro -this has the added advantage of having a witness who can provide another layer of third-party documentation -perhaps even a dated and notarized statement as to what he or she photographed.

2. If you can't afford a pro, hire a high-school kid. Or middle-school kid for that matter. Heaven knows they know more about techno9logy then you or I.

3. Stephen Dow has written on the subject in more detail then I have -from the perspective of a photographer rather then a collector. You might want to have a look at CreativePro.com and hunt him up under "digital-photography-how-to-building-a-light-tent"

In Photographing your Collection, Part 1: Part 1: Your Equipment I addressed the whys and with whats of photographing your collection. Now I do the wheres and hows of photographing your valued collection.

Bill Harvey makes drawer and display cases for collectors and museums at Home-Museum.com.
He is also author of the COLLECTOR's HOW-TO series for dedicated collectors and hobbyists who wish to display and protect their very best stuff.