Shooting With Your Smartphone

Shooting With Your Smartphone

Step One: Preparation

The equipment that we use in this tutorial is all pictured here.

After gathering all of your accessories and applications, it’s time to use your smartphone to capture your images. For this tutorial, we will be photographing a pair of earrings with an iPhone 5S smartphone, a Joby Grip Tight mount attached to a Vivitar mini flexible tripod, and Photojojo lenses. We will shoot the images using the Camera+ app, edit the images with Photoshop Express, and store and organize the images using Dropbox.

The foam board to the left bounces available light onto the “dark” side of the earrings.

1. Perfect your lighting.

First, consider your lighting situation and choose to set up your studio in an area with ample available light. We have utilized a large window to let soft natural light into our frame, as well as a small white foam board backdrop to bounce light onto the “dark” side of the earrings, as pictured above.

2. Set up your table and background.

After perfecting your lighting, it’s time to set up your table and white backdrop so that you have something to place your product and tripod on. We are using white seamless rolled paper for our backdrop, since earrings can very easily be displayed in a flattering manner by hanging them from the paper, as depicted below.

3. Stabilize and position your smartphone.

Next, mount your smartphone and position it at the proper distance from your product in order to center your product in the frame, as shown above. Because our earrings are small, we have placed our tripod and smartphone roughly one foot away from our product, as pictured in the image above. By using a Photojojo telephoto lens, we will be able to zoom close enough to capture the earrings at an optimal crop from this distance.

Note: Fill the frame with your product but leave enough space on all sides in case you need to crop the image.

For more details on setting up a small photo studio in your home or workplace, read our first DIY post here (How to build your own photo studio on a boot strapped budget).

4. Take care of the extra details.

Before you begin shooting, make sure that your product is pristinely clean and that all price tags and strings have been removed. Dust and minor damage can be fixed in post production, but removing as many imperfections as possible before you photograph your product will save you a good deal of time later.

Step Two: Capturing

1. Adjust the app settings.

Now that your setup and product have been meticulously prepared, you need to properly adjust your camera’s settings to ensure that you receive the best results.

The settings circled with red are the ones we recommend adjusting.

Zoom: Make sure that you have the zoom feature turned “ON” so that the zoom feature is easily accessible to you if you need it.

Grid: We recommend leaving the Grid function “ON” because it will help you to easily align your product in the middle of the frame.

Live Exposure: Live exposure mode will allow you to read your camera’s auto exposure settings as the camera adjusts it. It is good to take note of your exposure settings just in case you need to change them later.

AutoSave: This feature will allow you to specify where images are saved onto your smartphone as you capture them. The default is that images will be saved to the “Lightbox” contained within the Camera+ app, but you can change the destination if you would rather the images be sent somewhere else.

iCloud Lightbox sync: You can also sync your iCloud to your Camera+ Lightbox so that every image that you shoot will automatically be backed up into your iCloud.

Quality: It is very important that you set your image quality to High so that your smartphone can help you create the best images possible.

Sharing: If you utilize Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr, try setting up this service to facilitate easy sharing after you’ve edited your images.

2. Adjust the camera settings.

Now that you’ve properly adjusted your application settings, it’s time to work on changing the camera’s manual exposure settings to capture the best light within your frame.

The settings circled with red are the ones we recommend adjusting.

Zoom: Pull the zoom slider at the top of the screen to adjust the frame around your product. Make sure that all of the product fits inside the frame and make sure to leave enough room on all sides so that you can crop the image if necessary in post processing.

White Balance: To properly set the white balance according to the light temperature in your setup, touch the WB button and then touch the white background.

Exposure: Touch the circular Exposure button and then touch your product so that the camera knows to properly expose the product.

Focus: Touch the circular Focus button and then touch your product so that the camera knows to properly focus on the product.

LOCK: When you are finished adjusting each of these settings, make sure to tap each one again to lock the settings in place. This will keep the camera from auto-adjusting the settings while you are taking images.

Take a look at your image and see if you think that it needs to be brightened or darkened in order to achieve a proper exposure. If you think that the exposure needs tweaking, touch the +/- button below the circular Focus button and pull the slider up or down to change the exposure. Our exposure needed to be brightened. We began with the screen on the left and used the exposure slider to brighten the image several stops to create the screen on the right.

However, we still didn’t feel like the setting 0 EV really did the earrings justice, so we bumped the exposure up again to +0.7 EV. Now it looks great!

3. Capture the image.

Now that all of the settings have been adjusted and you have perfected your exposure, composition, and other elements of your image, it’s time to make a photo by pressing the big round button from the menu.

The button outlined in red is the shutter release button.

If you’d like to get even closer, try using your lenses to capture close-up detail shots with a macro lens or use a telephoto to zoom closer to your product from a distance. Switching lenses and/or zoom lengths will allow you to capture additional angles and create multiple images for your product listings, which will raise the overall appeal of your product.

Zooming closer with a telephoto lens allows us to capture the detail shot of the earrings seen on the right.

Since we saved our images into our Lightbox in Camera+, we will need to move the images into our phone’s “Camera Roll” to be able to edit them in Photoshop Express. To do so, touch the filmstrip at the bottom of the app, select the images you would like to save to your camera roll, and touch either “Save and Remove,” “Save and Keep,” or “Save Without Edits and Keep.”

Step Three: Editing

Now that we have our images saved into our phone’s Camera Roll, we will open up our editing application, Photoshop Express, and choose the images we would like to edit in order to prepare them for the web. All digital images need a little bit of tweaking to really shine. Here are a few basic adjustments that we recommend making to enhance your images: Crop & Straighten, Sharpen, Contrast, Shadows, and Vibrance.

After making just those basic five adjustments, you should notice a huge quality boost in your image, as we did. Here are the before (left) and after (right) images—which one do you think looks better?

There you have it, folks. You have now used your smartphone to create high quality product images for your business—and with this technique, everyone wins! You win because you didn’t have to scrounge up the budget money to buy or rent a DSLR camera to make great photos.

But most importantly, your customers win.

When you provide them with wonderful product images, they will know exactly what they’re buying when they decide to purchase your product. That will make them happy, and it will make them eager to do business with you again in the future—and isn’t that what running an online business, or any business for that matter, is all about?

Happy smartphone shooting!

Material organized by Olais K. Raphael | olais@olais.co.tz | www.olais.co.tz 

Social Worker | Community Organizer | NGO Founder | Public Speaker | Environmental Advocacy | Youth Worker | Social Leader | Life/Author Coach | Author of Is Like a Dream Novel and Sauti ya Mtoto Aliyepotea | Social Activist | Social Educator | Professional Photographer | Movie Editor 

Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/15163633-how-to-capture-high-quality-product-photos-with-your-smartphone