Gun Photo How To... (Page 2 of 8)
I have a few pieces of felt material that I use - neutral colors. My favorite is about a 22% gray which helps the meter a bit. Toss that guy on the work bench and away ya' go. Fold it up when you're done.  Then theres always the apartment's carpet. 
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Celebrating the Second Amendment
One Fine Firearm at a Time, Under God
One Fine Firearm at a Time, Under God
Divert the internal flash with a chunk of paper or aluminum in front of it, angled upwards. Light the scene with 2 slave flashes (about $20 each for cheapies on eBay). OR, turn the flash off, set up the lighting wtih standard tungsten lightbulbs (halogen/etc), take picture, and adjust for color balance later. BTW: EXCELLENT TUTORIAL, cugir!!! |
The person who complains most, and is the most critical of others has the most to hide.
Wearing a tea towel on your head does not constitute a recognized military uniform. -- vito113
Wearing a tea towel on your head does not constitute a recognized military uniform. -- vito113
You still have the canon fuze stain on your tile, don't you? |
The person who complains most, and is the most critical of others has the most to hide.
Wearing a tea towel on your head does not constitute a recognized military uniform. -- vito113
Wearing a tea towel on your head does not constitute a recognized military uniform. -- vito113
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well hell lemme show my stuff here from my example pics too much glare  not enough light  out of focus with crappy Paint improvements  fuzzy with glare  fuzzy out of focus and not enough light combo    luckily Tweak Industries has hired a competent professional photographer to provide future photographic services. 
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Moderation is for monks. RAH
It's a thankless job, luckily I have karma to burn.
HEY YOU WASHINGTONIANS!
http://ar15.com/forums/forum.html?b=8&f=15
It's a thankless job, luckily I have karma to burn.
HEY YOU WASHINGTONIANS!
http://ar15.com/forums/forum.html?b=8&f=15
It came off. 
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It is generally a bad idea to trick or treat as a zombie in an arfcom neighborhood.
That glare is your friend. Many guns are black. The best way to make the black details visible is to put some highlights on them...ie: glare. The glare on your pistol looks good in your pic. It's the glare on the table that looks bad. If you substituted a different background like black canvas, leather, wood, tac-gear, etc. then it would look ok. If you really want to shoot on that shiny table with the built in flash then you need to change your angle relative to the table. With light, the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection, like a bank shot in pool. If the ball/light comes in at 30 degree angle to a flat surface..it should leave at 30 degrees. It's like a ricochet. You shot the flash at that flat shiny surface at 90 degrees angle and it bounced right back into your lens. So to get the glare in the pistol but not the table try propping the pistol up with something to change its angle relative to the table and shoot closer to 90 degrees to the pistol but not 90 degrees to the table. |
Those are nice images. That top pic is a great example of sucessful use of on camera flash (ar at least 'on axis' flash). The glare from the light really brings out the details in the pistol. That same glare really works with the shiny background too. It looks like you are mixing flash with incandescent light. Actually upon closer exaqmination, it looks like you are not mixing light but I already typed the following... >>Flash is the same color as daylight...about 5000 degrees kelvin. which is a blue light. Incandeent light like tungsten and halogen is yellow light in comparison. Household incandescent lights are around 2500-3200 degrees kelvin. In some pics part of the image is yellow and the part closer to the camera is 'neutral' in color. The camera is grey balancing for the flash which makes the other lights n the image look yellow. If you need to do a wide angle shot with the backgrond lit by tungsten, it would be best to bring in a tungsten light like a home depot shop light to use as fill in the foreground insteadof the flash so the colors match.<< I darkend the vertical blinds and yellow wall for tactical points using adjustmant layers. Ichiro does this quite often. He also overdoes it often and it still works. Firearms lend themselves to these type of dark images.  
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dpmmn, that picture is f_n' awesome. 
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Here is my humble attempt. Any reccomendations would be apprciated. ETA: What photoserver should I use to make the pic smaller, the pic looks better smaller? Also, this pic is taken qwith a 1999 2 megapixel camera that I have no clue how to use. |
"A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government."
--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
That's what I'm talkin' about. A simple, reusable setup that provides perfect pics every time. Nice setup. |
I think it's a nice collection but the pic is 'washed out'. There are no blacks. It'd be best to reshoot a number of pics and pics the one with the best exposure. It is possible to improve the image in photoshop. First add some black by moving the black point in curves over to the right, then adjust the curve to taste. www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=121&t=396839&page=1&#-1  Beefing up the contras adds too much color to the stocks. Reduce this by using 'hue/saturation' control in photoshop to reduce overall saturation or just the saturation in the reds...or both.  A little more comtrast via curves and some white 'paint' on the buttom near the floor and it looks pretty good. 
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This picture is the best so far in this thread, IMO. Besides being unbelievably pimping with the satin sheets...it is intriguing. There is a great story here that says much more than just a pic of an AR. It also has those killer effects around the edges that add a sense of time. Is there a dead guy down there in the dark corner holding the strap? Outstanding, nice work
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Steyr, Did you shoot that image, I'll assume you did. That image ROCKS, as everybody knows. It's not because of great photography although it is good. It's because of the concept. Concept is the most important part of making a great photograph. Congratulations on making a piece of history.
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Precisely, any picture that answers a repeated question is one that saves me a lot of typing. I'm just vain enough to want them to look good tho.  With input from my staff photographer I am getting better tho, I finally figured out the macro, focal distance, zoom relationship along with "gels" (styro packing film) for the elbow lamps in the office. |
Moderation is for monks. RAH
It's a thankless job, luckily I have karma to burn.
HEY YOU WASHINGTONIANS!
http://ar15.com/forums/forum.html?b=8&f=15
It's a thankless job, luckily I have karma to burn.
HEY YOU WASHINGTONIANS!
http://ar15.com/forums/forum.html?b=8&f=15
You image looks great and has a lot of impact with the muzzle facing the camera and the aggresive/mechanical design of the revolver. When it apperaed onscreen it sad 'whoa' out load. Changing the size is easy if you have Photshop, I will outline the steps here. If you do not have Photoshop, you will need to use another imaging program to acheive the same things. I use a Mac. Maybe someone here can suggest a Free program for the PC which allows image size changes, sharpening and JPEG saving options. Saving an image for the web is not too difficult. First you will want to resize the image using a photo editing program. Image size is a little confusing as it can de described in a couple different ways. First is the pixel size. You could say an image is XXX number of pixels across the long dimension of the image. For instance, suppose your monitor is set at 1100 pixels wide and you are at ARFCOM. The Firefox window and ARFCOM borders and avitars surronding this message eat up some pixels so the actual room for an image in this message might only be about 700 pixels on an 1100 pixel monitor. By this logic it would be best to keep the image under 700 pixels wide so the viewer can see the whole image without scrolling. The best thing to do is open the 'image size' dialog box in your editing program and type 600-700 in the 'pixel dimensions' field for the long dimension of the image. If your program does not have a pixel size field then use the physical size field and the resolution field to acheive the same thing. 9.72 inches at 72 pixels per inch is the same as 700 pixels wide. 8.3 inches at 72 PPI is the same as 600 pixels wide..  After the image is sized, you can add some 'sharpening' to fix the blur caused by resizing. The best sharpening filter is photoshops 'unsharp mask' Try the settings below for your 600-700 pixel images. For larger images intended for print increase the radius to 1.0 and adjust the amount to taste.  Now that it is small and sharp its time to save it as a JPEG file. Use the 'save as' option to choose JPEG format and choose a MEDIUM to LOW quality setting. If the program gives you an estimated JPEG size, shoot for 50-100k  The last thing to do is upload the file to a free server like www.tinypic.com/. Here's your pistol made smaller, sharper and brighter via photoshop. 
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Those pics are great. That rifle pic could be a cover for a catalog. Is that just the sun and a white car hood or a studio setup? The other shot has great composition and theme. Only problem is the file size. They are over 400k each. That takes about 2 minutes or more to view on my (and others) dialup. Here's the same image at 56k filesize. It looks almost exactly like the big one. It compresses real good because of the limited aount of colors and texture. 
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I recommend The Gimp to anyone without the $$$ to pay for Photoshop. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's free (as in speech and as in beer) and has been built from the beginning to be something close to Photoshop. It's got all the same color controls and paintbrushes and other tools, and while some don't work quite the same (anyone used to photoshop's menus and keyboard shortcuts will hate The Gimp initially) it's more powerful than whatever comes free on windows. If you don't like it or don't feel like learning it (there's documentation on the site there) then you can probably find a trial version of Jasc's Paint Shop Pro which is probably about 2 steps lower than Photoshop Elements, but still lets you do the basics. Slightly OT but I made a very similar post over a year ago on another forum for computer modding. My goal was to get people to be able to take better pictures with the el cheapo digital cameras they had and the subject matter being dark with bright lights and macro type stuff. Lemme find the link to see what a professional thinks. I never got around to editing in example pics myself, but some of the other guys supplied some. here's the link Wow.. still stickied there... heh. |
BLARG EAT KITTENS!
Yes, it is one I did earlier this year prior to your post. |
It is generally a bad idea to trick or treat as a zombie in an arfcom neighborhood.
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Here is a closeup of a barrel recrown I did a while back. I used the on camera flash on a sony DSC-P50 (Cheapy 2Mpixel Sony). Fixed focus at .5m, moved camera distance until crown/rifling were sharp in the display. To illuminate the rifling, I stuck a plain borelight in the breech to give the "yellowish" color to them for recognition. Turned out nicely: 
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The person who complains most, and is the most critical of others has the most to hide.
Wearing a tea towel on your head does not constitute a recognized military uniform. -- vito113
Wearing a tea towel on your head does not constitute a recognized military uniform. -- vito113
Usually just the 11°, I have a lapping tool that is bore-centric for this. On the "step target" crowns (90 degrees to bore, 3/8" out, then chamfer up 1/16" for last 1/8-3/16", then round out) I don't, move the bit slow enough and the lathe makes a very nice looking but smooth design (like the outside of a SS barrel). |
The person who complains most, and is the most critical of others has the most to hide.
Wearing a tea towel on your head does not constitute a recognized military uniform. -- vito113
Wearing a tea towel on your head does not constitute a recognized military uniform. -- vito113
I know it's a large file-size, but the clients I work (I'm a Web/Graphic Designer) for are all involve users with high-speed connections, which is why I go for total resolution and clarity. Like you said, you lose color going down in size, as is obvious on the reduced photo. Thanks though. |