Photography and illustration talk, Part 4: Scale bars
February 15, 2014
Photography and illustration talk, Part 3: Backdrops and lighting
February 11, 2014
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.
Photography and illustration talk, Part 2: Taking good photographs
February 8, 2014
Photography and illustration talk, Part 1: Intro and Stromer
February 6, 2014
Recently I had the opportunity to give a talk on photographing specimens and preparing illustrations in Jim Parham‘s phylogenetics course at Cal State Fullerton. Jim is having each student (1) write a description of a specimen, (2) run a phylogenetic analysis, and (3) do some kind of calibration on their tree. I think that’s rad.
Anyway, it was fun talk and I wanted to put it up for everyone, but Mike had the idea of posting a batch of slides at a time, to hopefully fire some discussion on different aspects of photography and illustration. So if you’re impatient to see the whole thing, blame him! I will post the whole talk at the end of the post series, and you can find all of the talk posts here.
And now, on with the show.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 