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Photographing Electronics By Kevin Poulter Creating quality images of electronic devices can be very beneficial for both hobby and business projects. For insurance, keeping track of disassembly and assembly during repairs, showing your achievements to friends, publishing in magazines like Silicon Chip and much more. Image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/HSXIp58yPyI odern cameras make it possible to M photograph like a pro, but just as importantly, you need to have good techniques. This article has some essential tips to help you get the best results. Your camera’s purchase price and number of pixels are less critical than how you use it. Silicon Chip regularly receives photographs that have the subject too far away, too light or dark, part of the item cut off and/or too many reflections. Most of those can be easily avoided with some awareness and practice. So here are some tips for excellent images. The camera Expensive cameras can make photography easier. Cameras costing about $300 upwards will usually give clear images. In that price range, they might start at around 14 megapixels (Mp or millions of pixels). Major newspapers photographed news and sports images in the early days of digital with just four-megapixel SLR (interchangeable lens) cameras. The number of pixels isn’t as important as the quality and size of the sensor. Larger, lower-noise sensors capture more light and so give much better results in less-than-ideal lighting conditions. A larger sensor will mean less noise in the image and less blur due to camera shake due to capturing images faster. However, they also require larger and more expensive lenses for the best results. If you’re going to buy a camera, the best advice we can give is to check multiple reviews (eg, on photography websites) and look at sample images to see if you are happy with them. For all-weather photography, you can set up a bench inside with diffused tungsten lamps, diffused LED lamps, or a monoblock flash, like the pros. Even the kitchen bench can be a temporary “studio”, as shown in Photos 1 & 2. Three factors are important when it comes to setting up a studio: 1. light brightness (in Lumens) 2. light colour balance & rendition 3. background Your “studio” Why have strong light? It usually results in a less noisy image (especially for cameras with small sensors, like those on smartphones). Significantly, it also improves the depth of focus, which photographers also describe as “depth of field”. Stronger light means you can use a higher aperture number (f-stop), resulting in a smaller imaging aperture, so the electronic device being photographed is in focus from front to rear. This is especially important in close-ups; otherwise, everything immediately in front of and behind the subject will be blurry. A higher aperture number means a The earliest photographers used daylight studios, and you can too. Direct sunlight gives strong shadows but can be diffused with something like a white sheet. Overcast skies give a much softer and more diffuse light, although the light is more blue than direct sunlight. Most modern cameras will compensate for that. A significant advantage of sunlight is that it’s so strong that you can stop your camera lens down for greater depth of field (more on that later). Also, as it’s what our eyes are used to, it results in excellent colour rendition (again, more on this below). Lumens Photos 1 & 2: these radios were photographed on a kitchen bench, with flat white panels behind. Light was bounced from the ceiling. The radios are branded Philips, Mullard and Fleetwood, all made by the Philips group of companies. The end result is shown in the right-most photo, with some post-processing done in Photoshop. 36 Silicon Chip Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au Photo 3: bright LED lamps are available, like this Philips 27W version with 3000 lumens. It also has a high colour rendering index (CRI). smaller physical aperture for the light to pass through, which means less light will reach the sensor; hence, the need for brighter light and/or a more sensitive sensor. If your light is too intense for your camera’s maximum f-stop (meaning the images will be overexposed), you can move the light further away. As the distance from a light source increases, photons of light become spread over a wider area, resulting in the light intensity on the subject decreasing. Most cameras also let you decrease the sensor sensitivity (ISO or ASA) to overcome that problem. LED lamps are available in high lumens, like the Philips 27W bulb with 3000 lumens shown in Photo 3. Light colour Tungsten lamps project a very strong “warm” colour (yellow cast), so you are relying on camera settings like “auto white balance” to get the correct colours in your photos. It can be easier to use high-brightness ‘daylight’ LED lamps with a similar colour temperature to sunlight (around 6000K). Or go outdoors; see the “Photographing in sunlight” section below. Colour Rendering Index (CRI) The effect of a light source on colour appearance is expressed in the colour rendering index (CRI) on a scale of 0-100 (see Photo 4). Natural outdoor light at about noon has a CRI of 100 and is used as the standard of comparison for any other light source. CRI is not the same as a colour temperature in Kelvin because colour temperature only considers the average colour of light. CRI also depends on how evenly each wavelength of light is represented. A ‘daylight’ lamp at around 6000K could still have a very poor CRI if it’s only producing light at a few narrow wavelengths, making specific colours in objects you photograph look washed out or even the wrong colour entirely. This is one of the reasons it can be so hard to read resistor colour codes under artificial light! Philips states that the CRI of their LED lighting products is higher than 80. Look for lights with a CRI above 80 for good results with photography. Plain background An uncluttered background is important for a clear view of the product and to avoid nearby objects sharing their colour, reflection, or shape with the subject. A light (ideally white or grey) background will also help to bounce light onto the sides of the subject if you’re only illuminating it from one or two sources. One of the best backgrounds is very economical: a folding office wall planner/calendar on stiff card with a pure white background. It’s portable, usually super white on the rear, able to support reasonable weight and very inexpensive once it is out of date – see Photo 5. I paid $2 for an expired calendar in perfect condition. A folding one is best, or a bend can be scored. Photo 4: examples of the effect CRI can have on image colours. siliconchip.com.au Alternatively, 3mm or 5mm Corflute is available in white in several sizes at Bunnings or artist’s supply shops. Two pieces can be used, one vertical and another horizontal, butted to the vertical piece. Corflute is similar to cardboard but made from plastic (often used for political advertisements). A white project card can be curved for a seamless background for smaller electronic devices. Editor’s note: contrasting backgrounds are useful if you plan to remove the background using photo editing software. Cameras Many think, “I need a better camera to be a good photographer”. No! While there are undoubtedly inferior cameras, it is not so much the camera but how you use it that matters. A good photographer can get reasonable photos even with a fairly inexpensive camera (under some conditions, at least). Expensive cameras with high megapixels can make clearer images for poster prints, but that’s rarely needed. Some of the cover photographs for Radio Waves magazine were taken with cameras like the Nikon P900, which could be purchased for about $850 for a while. I have seen a $300 camera take very useful images; probably not cover material, but great for all other purposes. If you are looking for a good spec camera, the Nikon P950 or P1000 are very good fixed lens ‘superzoom’ cameras at about $1,300. The advantage is that the fixed zoom lens is very portable, and you don’t have to buy a lens separately; good SLR lenses can be expensive. Nikon, Canon and other brands also make more economical versions of zoom lens cameras. Photo 5: a calendar can be used as a backdrop. Australia's electronics magazine October 2023  37 My review of the similar earlier model, the P900, was published in the August 2015 issue (siliconchip. au/Article/8831). Decent SLR cameras with basic lenses are also available. The Nikon D7500 with a basic lens can be found between $1500 and $2000, but the Canon EOS 1500D is a bargain at around $700 for the body with an 18-55mm lens. It’s pretty basic for an SLR but still represents a big upgrade from a phone camera! “Mirrorless” cameras like the Sony ZV-E10 are popular these days and generally will be cheaper than an equivalent SLR. Still, we prefer the much clearer viewfinder on an SLR, despite SLR cameras being a bit bulkier and more expensive. Mobile phones Mobile phone cameras now have around 100 megapixels, so they must be good, right? Mostly they are not ready for high-quality magazine shoots, as it’s not the megapixels but how they capture and process the images. Despite this, mobile phone owners, the author included, take many snapshots on mobile phones due to the convenience (“the best camera is the one you have with you!”). The cover for the January 2022 issue of Radio Waves was shot on an iPhone by David Bartlett under incandescent light, so I removed the yellow cast, made the background white and sharpened the image, all in Photoshop. The result was pretty good – see Photo 6. Alternative to Photoshop The camera is important, but post-processing is, too. Processing can convert a photo that’s just OK into a great one as long as its fundamentals are fine (the subject is in the frame, in focus, not overexposed etc). A free software program called GIMP is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. It can do much of the image manipulation that’s possible in Photoshop (although not all). However, be careful you download from the official site, which is www. gimp.org/downloads/ We sometimes use it on computers that don’t have Photoshop for basic image manipulation as it is not worth Photo 6: this cover image was taken with an iPhone. It needed a fair bit of processing but turned out OK. Photo 7 (above): purchase camera memory cards from reputable suppliers and brands. 38 Silicon Chip Australia's electronics magazine paying $30+ per month just to do basic jobs like removing backgrounds or adjusting colour balance. There are some extra steps if you plan to edit RAW images in GIMP, as it cannot natively open that file type. There is also a free add-on called darktable that adds that capability (www. darktable.org). Good foundations What makes a good photograph of an electronic device? It should be a clear image that shows the whole object with all its details, in the right colour, at the right angle and with a plain background. Camera instruction manuals can be daunting. However, reading the book and making a few “once only” adjustments to the camera will reap the reward of consistently good images. Important camera settings include: 1. Choose the highest resolution available with the least compression. That will fill your memory card quicker; however, a 32GB card will still hold about 3000 images. 2. Save to JPG/JPEG, as it is the main file option on most cameras. JPEG is a lossy system, but if you choose the least compression/largest file, it compares extremely well to lossless formats like TIFF. 3. Some cameras have a “save to RAW” option. RAW enables a broader range of adjustments to be made after the photograph is saved but uses significantly more space on the memory card, takes longer to read/write and takes more time to complete a finished image. Like many professionals, I don’t use RAW at all. 4. Automatic exposure and autofocus are recommended. Both should be set to centre spot if that’s in the menu list. Aim the autofocus centre spot toward the most critical area to be in focus; for example, the tuning dial of a radio. Manual focus and exposure can be experimented with later on. I only use manual focus about once a year. 5. The camera is likely already set to auto white balance at the factory, although that is worth checking. In summary, check that the following are set, if not already: highest resolution, JPG, centre spot auto exposure, centre spot autofocus and auto white balance. Importantly, take one or two photos with your preferred settings at the start of a photo session and then look siliconchip.com.au Photo 8 (left): a radio photographed under less than optimum lighting. at them. Ensure you’re happy with the exposure, depth of field, colour balance etc. Tweak settings like exposure compensation and f-stop if necessary. It’s much easier to make one or two changes at the start than to take dozens of photos only to find they all have the same problem! Photo 9 (below): the same radio photographed in midday sunlight. Note the mirrors and black card controlling reflections. You can see how the blue card in the background is reflected by the radio, showing why using neutral colours is important. The card in the foreground keeps the front panel dark and neutral; however, some reflection was left in the upper front panel to show the pattern in the Bakelite. Memory cards Get your memory cards from a wellknown brand with a decent capacity from a trustworthy supplier. Some dodgy online sellers label a small-­ capacity card with a much higher number. You could lose many images if the capacity is fake or the card is low quality and fails. A friend used a card for a once-only event and found the photos were nearly totally lost. The camera manual will state the maximum capacity and card type that suits. A 32GB card (like in Photo 7) may hold up to 3000 high-res images in some cameras. Be sure to download images to external storage like a computer regularly, or you could lose all your pictures if there is a glitch. Lighting Lighting is probably the single most important aspect of getting good photos. You usually want fairly even illumination without harsh shadows, and it needs to be bright enough to avoid sensor noise and to give you the desired depth of field. It also needs to provide a good CRI, as described earlier. On-camera flashes are convenient but generally unsuitable for shooting electronics because too much light is reflected directly back to the camera, causing flare. If you get a high-end flash for an SLR, you can use bounce flash, where the light bounces off the ceiling, but that’s still far from ideal. Professional photographers have a studio with expensive lighting to produce top-quality photographs at any time, regardless of the weather. You can set up a home bench or workbench studio, and some readers have. It can be temporary if you don’t mind carting the lights and other gear out when you need to take some photos, then putting them away afterwards. Photo 10 of the AWA “Big Brother” shows what can be achieved outdoors in sunlight or cloudy bright conditions. It is important to control the light, indoors or outside, or the image siliconchip.com.au may look flat with no detail, like in Photo 8. Preparing the item Quality images reveal blemishes, including dust, so clean and detail the device. It is amazing how much dust shows in a photograph that was not evident when setting up. Some can be retouched later in an application like Photoshop or GIMP, but it’s best to save computer time and effort by cleaning the device first. You also risk losing detail if you do too much post-processing. If you have an air compressor with an oil separator, you can blow off much of the dust with an appropriate nozzle. You can also remove dust with a cloth, but it’s pretty tricky to clean a PCB that way, as you generally can’t get between the components very well. You can Australia's electronics magazine Photo 10: the resulting photo from the setup in Photo 9. Similar results can be obtained indoors with LED lights or studio flash units. October 2023  39 Photo 11: photographing this radio on patterned glass gives an interesting effect. dampen the cloth for external surfaces to improve dust adhesion or use a special dusting cloth. Consider whether you want any power cords or other cables in the shot. Generally, it’s better to hide them behind the device or have them go out of the frame. If a front panel knob or similar is missing, you could fix that in post-processing with a bit of copying and pasting, but you need to know what you are doing if you don’t want it to look obviously fake! Knobs can look neat if they are all on the same angle, similar to how commercial photographers set a watch to ten past ten for the best images. If the device you’re photographing has a screen (especially a touchscreen), give it a bit of a wipe before photography to remove any fingerprints and such. Do the same for any glass or glossy parts of a device, as they tend to pick up marks easily. Lights on or off? If the device is not fully operational, it is not essential to have the 40 Silicon Chip lights illuminated. The example AWA radio was not powered up for the photos. Instead, the dial was brightened in Photoshop, and a yellow tint was added to resemble the appearance of low-power incandescent dial lamps. If you are taking photos in bright light (as we recommend), it will often overpower any lights or screen images, making them look like they are off, even if they are on. If you need to capture the lights/ screen illumination, you will have to take a second photo from the same angle in darkness with a steady camera (eg, on a tripod) to avoid blur. The light/screen images can then be composited onto the main image taken in bright light to reproduce what the human eye sees. Photographing in sunlight For photographing this AWA Big Brother, the budget was about $25 $30, and these items can be reused again and again: ● A calendar/planner poster or Corflute pieces. Australia's electronics magazine ● Three black project poster cards. About $10 total, and can be purchased from stationery stores. ● Two or three mirrors, A4 size or slightly smaller (see Photo 9). Available from discount variety stores. The most common cheap mirrors are usually acrylic, so they won’t cut or shatter by accident. ● Blu-Tack and stable containers, like bottles or cans, to tilt the mirrors at extreme angles if needed. Bright midday light is best – sunny or bright cloudy – as it ensures the best depth of focus and, most likely, the best colour temperature. Choose the highest aperture f-stop available on your camera (for SLRs, it’s often f/22) for the best depth of field unless you are planning on purposefully blurring the background. In that case, you’ll have to experiment with the f-stop to get just enough depth of field for the subject. If the weather is strongly overcast, the images may exhibit a strong blue cast unless your camera has very good auto white balance. The images will be quite soft, too; that might be what you want, depending on your goals. Avoid early morning and late afternoon daylight photography, as the resulting images will have a yellow tint. The sun or artificial light is best ‘over your shoulder’. If your camera can’t fully correct for the yellow/blue cast, you can still do it later in post-processing. It’s a good idea to have a white object (like a sheet of printer paper or a small white card) somewhere in the frame to make that easier. However, that object must not be overexposed to be used as a white reference. Note that mirrors can also be used in studios, reducing the need for so many expensive flash units. The method for taking the photograph shown in Photo 10 was: 1. Place the device (in this case, a radio) on a table, with the white background in position. 2. Select an angle that shows some of the side and part of the top of the device. 3. Chances are you will see reflections and bright areas. You may even see colour casts from nearby objects, like walls. Nearly always, the top of the device and one side is way too bright. So strategically place pieces of black card to fix these. 4. Some devices like the AWA Big siliconchip.com.au Brother radio look best with their curves and features highlighted. This is a visual adjustment by trial and error, using mirrors or white cards. To avoid too much overall highlighting, the AWA had less mirror highlighting on the left side of the picture. This was achieved by changing the angle of the mirror. Moving the mirror further away also reduces highlights. 5. During photography, change the shooting angle to give plenty of choices for the later selection of images. Digital photography is essentially free, so take many extra photos until you are experienced. Many cameras enable auto-focus when the shutter is pressed halfway down; aim at something that needs to be crisp or an object in the middle of the device. In this case, I used the radio dial. 6. It’s generally best to avoid wide-­ angle lenses or zoom lens settings less than 50mm, as they will distort the image. Even high-end wide-angle lenses can’t prevent the visual oddity inherent in wide-angle photography. Long telephoto lenses can make an image seem flat, so the best choice is usually between 50mm and 200mm (35mm equivalent). 7. Crop the subject to near full frame to achieve the best resolution. If the image has a generous border around it, the resolution/clarity of the subject may be lowered (this is less of a concern with high-megapixel cameras). However, it’s better to err on the side of having too much border than cutting any part of the subject off, as the former will still give you a usable image! 8. Carefully look at the results in your camera preview indoors, where the most detail can be seen. It is good to be picky because taking more photographs at this stage is so easy. Zoom in to check the details. 9. Now you’re ready to make post-photography adjustments. If the device was photographed on a white background, the image may be ready to use out of the camera. Note how the top of the radio (in Photo 9) is a good tone as it is reflecting the black card above. The same applies to the side. The black card in front of the radio reduces a very light area that appeared when it was placed on the white background. The horizontal highlights are from the sun, while the vertical highlights were created by the mirrors directing the sun. If cards and mirrors can be seen in the final photo, the radio background can be cut out in a graphics application. In this example, some small areas had a colour cast, so in Photoshop, an eyedropper was placed in a good area of the case’s colour, a lasso drawn over the colour cast and a new layer opened. The lasso area was filled with the best colour, and the layer’s setting changed to ‘colour’ to remove the tint. Many specks of dust were also removed using the ‘stamp’ and ‘dust and scratches’ tools. Then, the dial was adjusted for more contrast, brightened, sharpened, and a yellow tint was added to make it look like it was illuminated. You don’t need to do that much post-processing; the cleaner you can make the image from the camera by tweaking the setup, the less fiddling will be required later to get the best result. Reflections for great style There are several ways to photograph electronic devices like radios on a reflective surface to achieve a classy result – see Photos 11-13. Consider Laminex, a kitchen bench, or a piece of glass or acrylic on top of a colour. The lower the angle of view, the stronger the reflection shows. From screen to paper One of the biggest challenges when working on an image on a computer screen is that it can look perfect, with plenty of detail, because the image is backlit. Ultimately knowing how to set the final colour, brightness and contrast so it looks good in print comes from experience. If the end goal is Photo 12 & 13: an Astor GS photographed on Laminex. The unedited photo is shown at left, while the right-hand photo has a background, and other post-processing, added in Photoshop. siliconchip.com.au Australia's electronics magazine October 2023  41 Photos 14 & 15: Both of these photos were taken without a macro lens. The left image was taken with a mobile phone; the resistors are just 6mm long. The right image was taken by an iPad, and is of an area just 55mm in width; with two suspect joints circled in red. It was lit by a desk magnifier with a LED and the resultant photo slightly sharpened. colour prints, you can have some small test prints made first. The colour can be glaringly wrong in print, even though it looked correct on the computer. Remember that a computer screen usually uses RGB colour while printing is almost always CMYK. CMYK processes can’t reproduce all RGB colours (and vice versa). Converting the image to CMYK, then viewing it on-screen can give you some idea of how it might look in print. Fortunately, the colour should be good if the image was taken around noon on a sunny day. You could also invest in a monitor calibration device (or a monitor with good out-of-thebox colour performance) so you know that what you’re seeing is reasonably accurate. When an image is dark and not showing a range of tones, either photograph it again with mirrors lighting dark areas, or use the “Shadows & Highlights” adjustment in Photoshop (or the Colours → Shadows-Highlights menu option in GIMP). Adjusting the Original image’s ‘curves’ via the Curves menu option can also help to improve tonal problems, including where it looks washed out or too stark. With the device opened up, it may be very hard to see internal components like the speaker deep in the ‘cave’. Flash-on-camera (or more mirrors) can help with this. Try a few different angles to reduce flash highlight shine. the yellow setting to much lower. I then slightly reduced the wide-angle lens perspective using the Perspective tool, followed by lightening and sharpening the dial. Finally, I removed the background by tracing around the radio and deleting the unwanted part of the image. Editor’s note: Photoshop also has built-in lens correction under the Filter menu where you can select from a variety of different camera makes, models and lenses. Photographing with a phone Close-up shots As mentioned earlier, if you have a Original modern phone with a high-spec camera, that could work for medium-­size prints or on-screen display. Looking at the turquoise radio on the cover of the January 2022 Radio Waves, the iPhone made an acceptable photograph. Dave Bartlett photographed the radio on a table under an incandescent light. Upon receiving his image, I corrected the strong warm yellow colour cast using the Photoshop colour adjustment menu, especially moving An expensive macro lens is likely not needed for close-ups. Using a camera, move in as close as possible, then enlarge the resulting image – see Photos 14 & 15 as examples. Or try a mobile phone or iPad if they have a close-up facility. The smaller sensors in mobile devices make taking close-up photos easier. You also have the option of cropping an image and ‘blowing it up’ on the computer if you can’t get close enough with your lens. The earlier comment about removing dust is only magnified by macro photography. Photo 14 shows how important it is! Editor’s note: many SLR lenses have a fairly large minimum focus distance. To overcome this, we purchased the “AF-S VR Micro Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF ED” for our Nikon SLR camera. While expensive, it is the best macro lens we’ve tried, bar none – see Photo 16. We recommend it if you can afford it! Its vibration reduction (VR) function makes handheld shooting easy, too. SC Photographing inside a device Enhanced (below) Photo 16: the cropped output of Silicon Chip’s camera with the Nikkor 105mm macro lens (left), plus an enhancement of a section of that image (right). As the original was shot with a ‘softbox’ light, it’s a little soft, so it was sharpened, along with other enhancements, to compensate. Enhanced (below) 42 Silicon Chip Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au