Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Somewhat lamely, this is the only slide I had in about lighting. I left it up while I talked about the most important points, which are:

• Don’t use a flash unless you absolutely have to.
• If you can swing it, the common convention is to have specimens illuminated from the upper left.*
• If you have the time, it’s not a bad idea to bracket your Goldilocks shot with brighter and darker photos, by fiddling with your camera settings.

* I happily violate this convetion if illumination from another angle shows the specimen to better advantage–and if I have any control over illumination. Working with big bones in some collections, you basically have overhead florescent lights and that’s it. The NHM shot above may look not-so-hot, but there we at least had a desk lamp we could move around. In a lot of places I’ve worked, I didn’t have even that.

The other posts in this series are here.