Gun Pic's ...What do you think?

[Salty1]

We finally broke down and bought a new camera (Nikon 3100) so we can take quality pics, the old point and shoot just was not working for us. Would appreciate your comments and any suggestions, I buily a light box for the pic's and am thinking the red background should go. I have seen some very good pic's on the forum so feel free to suggest other things to try.... stilll trying to figure out why the entire pic is not showing, maybe it is just the laptop monitor

[karl]

They look pretty good to me. I am by no means a professional, but I would change these things: the colored cardboard on which the pistols are sitting reflects the flash, try using something that absorbs rather than reflects, cloth is good (or crop the photo to remove the parts you don't like ). Do you have a softener for the flash? I see a little bit of glare on the handle of the revolver that may even be fixed by changing the angle of the subject, which will also give a little more light to the underside of the cylinder.

For the Sig, looks like your autofocus is selecting the area around the magazine release, might try manual focus and play around with it.

[flintknapper]

Not bad for starters.

Did you shoot those pics in Macro? I noticed certain parts of each pistol are slightly out of focus (not sharp).

You can "bounce" your flash too.

[A-R]

Salty, your pics look great. I agree the red background could go, but it's a personal preference thing. I like plain white background with blued/black guns and dark grey or black background with chrome/nickel guns.

Just remember, like a wedding photographer, working with stark blacks and whites will require some exposure compensation and tweaking.

[cheezit]

not enugh exif data to tell all of what was done.
try shooting at f8 or so. that should get the bulk in focus.
the lighting is a litte harsh and needs to be softened up some.
try going to a fabric store and gets some small squares of cloth to use insted of poster board. that will reduce the shadows and glare as well as provide more even lighting.
use white poster board for the the sides of the light box too.
all in all great work.

[Salty1]

Thanks for the feedback, I eventually may figure it all out. I did not use a flash in any of the photos, the guns are in a light box that has a white shees around it and I have (3) 60 watt flood lights shining through the sheet, 1 on top and 1 on each side. The cloth "floor" is a great idea to absorb some of the reflections. I guess if the stainless can be mastered then the other finishes should be easy to shoot....

[OverEasy]

In case you haven't noticed, the 'decocker' has fallen off of your P239.

Nice pics!

I once bought an expensive Nikon SLR. After almost a week of taking pictures on vacation in Spain I discovered the film was not advancing. I hadn't got the gears hooked in the little holes on the edge of the film.
I let my wife take the pictures now.

Regards, OE

[Matt78665]

Very nice pics!!!!!!!

[NcongruNt]

Good images, decent camera you have there. I'm a big fan of Nikon cameras, I shoot my gun photos primarily with a D90.

A white background would probably help, and I generally do some post-processing in The GIMP, which is a free Photoshop work-alike. For gun photos, I do a few things to make the gun look better, especially when I have sub-optimal lighting in my photos. I did a little adjustment on one of yours, just to show what happens with it:



First, I run it through the auto white-balancer. This will fix some of the color inaccuracies in the photo. In this case, it appears to primarily have pulled out some magenta in the midtones, most likely due to some reflection off the background board.

Then, I pull the contrast and brightness up some. This pulls out the detail (such as the engraving here) and gives the image a little more striking appearance. In this case, it also pulled out the corrugation in the board that you shot the photo on, so you'll want to pick a background material with as few variations as possible.

Since guns are generally not too colorful, I'll pull the saturation of color down in the overall image, so your eye is drawn to the gun and not anything else in the background. This will also make any reflected colors and spots of irregular lighting less evident in the finished photo.

I do some professional camera work, but I'm currently hamstrung for object photography by the fact that I have no seamless background available to me. The kitchen counter is the closest thing I have, and doesn't give me room to set up my lights. To help deal with this, the above techniques done in GIMP help a lot, especially due to the fact that my kitchen has only tungsten bulbs that are not uniform in temperature. I usually have to do a little manual color adjustment at the highlight/midtone/shadow level to get them to look better. Here is an example of a recent shoot to document my AR build:

Original:


After post-processing:


Manual color adjustment is a bit involved for someone unfamiliar with lighting and photography techniques, but the simple steps above should be relatively easy to pick up with a little bit of time spent playing with these features. Anyhow, enjoy your camera!

[Salty1]

NcongruNt, thanks for the tips, I guess I will be doing a lot of experimenting in my spare time. Taking suggestions from this thread I took a few more photos, they seem to be getting better.

[cheezit]

no harsh glare, very much in focus.
gettn much better.

[aaronspuler]

try the bathtub for a uniform white background...

[JDRFL1]

nice photos