Our favorite tools have a new home on the wiki. Each week we’ll muse about one of them. Have your own tool review? We’ll post that too!
Our photo studio is setup for quick and easy photographs. It’s on a table right next to a computer in the development area so we can do demos without dragging out a laptop. USB, serial, network, and power cables are tied to the table legs and ready to go.
For reflection-free photos we use a cheap light tent with a nice piece of watercolor paper as the background. Two halogen lights came with the light tent, but the bulbs leave photos with a yellow or pink hue. You might notice that in our pictures, especially older photos. Better lighting is a high priority.
Several small tools always come in handy. A toothbrush and canned air are great for blasting away a spec of dust from an otherwise perfect shot. Sticky tack is great for posing a scene, we use it to hold boards and cables in place. One thing we’re sorely missing is a tripod to hold PCBs upright and square for photos.
We use close-up pictures all the time to show a schematic next to actual parts. For a long time we used a simple point-and-shoot digital camera in macro (flower) mode. Few of the shots turned out, so we took a bunch every time and hoped for the best. Usually it took two or more reshoots to get an in-focus picture without dust or reflections, and each time we had to move the SD card and reset the camera. It was super annoying, so we started looking for something better.
In 2011 we moved to a Cannon EOS 500D. Our only criteria, besides price, was some kind of live preview over USB. This was the only camera in our price range that clearly listed that feature. The picture quality is more than adequate for 500pixel web shots.
The PC interface is bubbly, annoying, and hard to configure, but it is functional. Live preview is good for coarse adjustments. Is has a helpful alignment grid, the focal point can be set with a mouse clock, and an eye-dropper sets a custom white level. Test shots show what to expect in the final picture, this is where we catch any dust, color, or reflection problems. Final shots are copied to the PC and display immediately. Gripes about the software aside, this setup is exactly what we wanted. It saves a bunch of time, and we never have to swap SD cards.
There are a couple upgrades we plan to make. Better lighting is the first priority, something with a good white color. Aligning the boards with the camera is a pain. A stand to hold boards upright, or a camera tripod that faces down, is also a high on the to-do list. The camera lens has a minimum 10 inch focus distance, and expensive macro lens would let us get in closer but probably isn’t worth the extra cost.
Adafruit has a great photography tutorial, don’t forget to check it out.
There’s more tools too.
have you tried some 1W or 3W white leds ? number of them outside the tent instead of those 2 halogen lamps might solve the problem.. I have not tried but I plan to make a small tent (for my wife actually) and I plan to use bunch of 1W white leds together with my 50D ..
what software you use for live preview over usb and image copy? Something that came on cd’s with 500D ? (I got some cd’s with my 50D with some sw but it is all windoze centric so not really usable for me)
I’m using the stuff that came on the disks with the camera. Windows only (not even Mac)….
One hint about macro … macro rings ! .. you can find macro rings fairly cheap online .. so just get ones that are same dia as your current lens (I assume you have some 128mm or 135mm lens with 72mm cap on that baby but I can’t see it from the picture) … the macro ring will allow you to get closer with the camera so with proper lighting and good tripod you can get nice pictures.
I don’t see if you are taking a shot from windoze or from the camera itself, if you do it from camera, either get a remote trigger or set the trigger to “3sec delay” so that you do not shake camera when doing long exposures
something like this:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/673422-REG/Redrock_Micro_2_19_0007_HD_Achromatic_Lens_.html
To get good white shots, get bulbs with the correct color temperature in K degrees. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature)
My experience with LEDs has been even with the “white” ones they tend to lean to the blue end of the spectrum.
I agree with the macro ring for close ups. I usually go to a longer shot with the lens “stopped” down to get a good depth of field.
The “correct temperature” is not easy to get, bulbs either cost arm and a leg or they cost only arm but the color on the “spec” and one emitted from the bulb are not same :( …
as for the white leds, they are really blue leds with “color shifting substrate” if I remember correctly .. so it is normal that they take to blue .. but it should be easy for camera to filter this out… Unfortunately I don’t have some good RAW -> PNG software neither some good skills in picture editing…
As long as both lights are the same, you should be able to white balance and make any (reasonable…) light source appear perfectly white in your photo. I use compact fluorescents which are traditionally frowned upon by photo color purists, but after a white balance they work just fine for me. If you shoot RAW, you can white balance just as well after-the-fact. (Shooting JPEG, you can still do white balance afterwards, but you loose some quality doing so.)
I use the Sigma 70mm macro lens on a Canon 50D, which gives very high quality closeups (probably overkill for web photo use).
This is one of the problems I have – one of the halogen bulbs burned out, so I tried to find a replacement. The original was very with and very nice, everything I’ve found as a replacement has been ‘cool white’ or off white colors for home use.
So now i Have one good white bulb, and one off-white bulb. I should probably swap in the off-white in the other and go for a better white balance, but I keep hoping to find a better lighting solution instead :)
Also, if you aren’t already using it, I like the Google Picasa program for basic photo organizing and quick edits (align, color / exposure correct, crop, add text). It’s a free download from Google. But when shooting RAW, I first do the white balance and any exposure shift using the Canon DPP tool. Here’s a photo I shot today with that workflow (remember, you can zoom in with the magnifying tool icon) https://picasaweb.google.com/bealevideo/Arduino#5600746815094045938
you’ve probably already seen this, but adafruit has a lighting how-to:
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/08/25/how-to-take-great-photos-of-your-projects-the-adafruit-photo-tutorial-by-johngineer/ ( i think i stumbled onto that through DP or HAD)
i’ve noticed that my cheap 1kW halogen worklights seem to provide decent lighting. upon some quick research halogen appears to be around 3000 deg K color temperature, whereas standard photographic tungsten bulbs burn closer to 3400 deg K.
at any rate, like John B. said, you should be able to do some white balancing to help in the mean time.
here’s a link for worklights like i was referencing. my complaints are that the lights won’t adjust to shine down (only up) and that i broke the plastic piece that holds together the base of the tripod. . .but admittedly, i use the lights for home improvement projects, so they see quite a bit of abuse
http://www.lowes.com/SearchCatalogDisplay?Ntt=utilitech+work+light&langId=-1&storeId=10151&catalogId=10051&N=0
Thanks for the reminder, I meant to include the adafruit tutorial in the post.
I usually let my camera do the auto white balance … mostly because it does the better job then what I do with limited sw I have.
I don’t really use any windoze in da house and Linux is still few decades behind on the mlatimudia hence I have GIMP and Shotwell (and few others that use dcraw to parse raw images..) and they all together can’t do what photoshop could 10 years ago :( … if the guy’s from Adobe once decide to make a CS package for Linux I think I would be one of the first clients.. I can’t see what is the problem to “pick the spot that is supposed to be white” and “pick the spot that is supposed to be black” and render a jpeg from raw using this 2 points .. can’t get simpler then that :( but .. never mind … I have somewhere those cd’s I got with 50D, maybe I can try to run the sw under wine, who knows, it might even start :)
Custom whitebalance is simple on canon camera’s (and I guess also on other dslrs).
Poor man solution:
– take a sheet of paper (A4), draw a black dot on it
– take a picture of the sheet (same lighting conditions as the subject to photograph) the black dot helps the autofocus. Alternatively use manual focus without the dot.
– use this picture as custom whitbalance (on 7D: menu, photomenu2, custom WB, select picture you just made)
I think custom whitebalance is only available in Av, Tv, M mode.