Photography Tips (for Technic Reviews or Contests)

[Zerobricks]

True! It's probably my best picture. So bright and crisp

I could post it in a digital rendering topic and say I have been working on my rendering skills

I DARE YOU!!11!!ONE!

[Alasdair Ryan]

Keep it for a April fools joke.

[Zerobricks]

Keep it for a April fools joke.

Mah we will all forget untill that date...

[Alasdair Ryan]

I won't.

[Zerobricks]

Wanna bet? No alarm clock/calendars/notes allowed though

[Alasdair Ryan]

Well you need to make a mental note don't you....

[Zerobricks]

Whats the expiration date of your mental notes

[Alasdair Ryan]

Well,I remember when Jim was called Ted....and instead of DrJB making five new posts a day it was Dluders.

I can even remember the all the staff changes since I joined,we did not even have a LDD forum when I first started.

Oh and there was someone called Zorro.

Edited November 29, 2014 by Alasdair Ryan

[Blakbird]

Well,I remember when Jim was called Ted....and instead of DrJB making five new posts a day it was Dluders.

I can even remember the all the staff changes since I joined,we did not even have a LDD forum when I first started.

I can remember when Alasdair was born .....

[Alasdair Ryan]

That sounds a bit creepy....

You must mean the year.

[Blakbird]

That sounds a bit creepy....

You must mean the year.

No, I was there in non-corporeal form hovering outside the window.

[Alasdair Ryan]

Ah....I see.

[legolijntje]

No, I was there in non-corporeal form hovering outside the window.

The fact that you don't put a smiley behind that makes it sound more creepy than it already is

[Jim]

Since some people asked me about my setup, I will move this to the Technic forum.

[Jim]

Done!

Especially for Jantjeuh...and other members

[dr_spock]

I'll toss in my 2L Technic axle.

Depth of field (DOF) is dependent on the lens, aperture and distance from the subject. Don't be afraid to try smaller apertures like f16, f18, f22... if it helps to get your entire subject in focus. LEGO is basically smooth without a lot of fine line details and you're displaying your pics at 1024x768 max on Eurobricks, so some diffraction may not even be noticeable. Experiment to find out how small you can go before it is unacceptable. Nothing is more annoying than someone showing off his MOC using F5.6 because that's his lens published sweet spot and the back half of his MOC is too out of focus to make out what he did there.

If your camera has a smaller sensor, you have more DOF on the same aperture setting as on a DSLR. That's probably why people with small sensor point and shoot cameras have more MOC in focus pictures than those with DSLRs. If you have a high megapixel camera, you can shoot further back and crop the picture. DOF is a function of aperture, lens focal length, focus distance and sensor size. (There are DOF calculator apps.) If you're doing extreme closeup or macro work, you can use a technique called focus stacking to get a bunch of shallow DOF pictures into one sharply focus picture of your subject.

Here is an interesting tutorial on depth of field: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm

Besides playing with the metering modes--spot, evaluative, average, partial, you can also use Exposure Compensation to brighten or darken your shot. EV+/-

Shooting RAW or JPEG or RAW+JPEG depends on how much time you have for post processing and space on your memory card. RAW gives you more room to fix exposure, white balance, etc. problems and tweak things after the fact. If you shoot action photography like your MOC flying off a ramp and smashing into pieces, you may want to stick with JPEG since camera buffer can store more JPEGs than RAW images and better FPS (Frames per second) with JPEGs.

The more you can get correct out of the camera, the less work you'll have to do in post. Time spent in post processing is time not spent with your LEGO.

[Squirrelf]

Hi all and Jim !

This is a little story about how I got back into lego thanks to a photo gig, and most importantly the 360 turntable setup using EV3 minstorm set
I'm a web-developper and a freelance photographer (mostly portraiture and a few product photography )

Last year I had a small gig, a client wanted picture of about 40 pairs of sunglasses, a small website and brochure. Not knowing their budget, I offered different options, one of them was 360 sliders on the website to have a better view at the sunglasses ( exactly like what Jim did in the 42069 review ).
They had a smallish budget for what they wanted. I definitely wasn't paid enough to spend my time doing 24pictures of 40 pair of sunglasses, that's 960pictures, and making sure I'm rotating exactly 15degrees each time to have a very smooth rotation, that would be a lot of boring work. As a programmer, we learn to be lazy but efficient, and avoiding boring, and that would be the opposite of that.

So I looked into a programable turntable, found one for over 1200USD, out of my budget especially for something I might not use often, and just seems overpriced for what it is. So I thought of lego Mindstorm, saw how NXT and EV3 were many step better than the RCX I had as a kid. And a lot cheaper than that turntable, especially for something more versatile like lego (I eventually want to build a mouse toy launcher for my cat), so I had decided it was going to happen.

I bought the Education EV3 Set with the expansion set. Enough lego pieces for what I needed.
Main reason I bought the edu version is that it comes with a battery and a cable to charge it (which are otherwise pretty expensive if bought separately ), so that it would not die on the job. once the whole thing was setup the EV3 was not accessible (sitting in the middle of a homemade lightbox )

I was excited when I saw how much lego technic had evolved with cool useful pieces since the early 2000s.

Building the turntable

Step one get reacquainted with Lego, didn't plan anything and just started building it without any planning, and failed multiple times but each iteration would get better and better, took me about 5 tries from scratch to get something very usable. 

I used both larger motor on the same axle, but one motor may be enough. screw gear on that axle, to gear down and get as much power and smoothness at very low speed. I wanted to use the least amount of gear as possible to avoid play/gear backlash. Forgot exactly the gearing setup, but I remember that was an issue I tried to solve, my last iteration was pretty good.

Used the large turntable (from the ev3 set) lego piece in the center of it all.

the main platform is made of the rectangle frame as you can see in the picture,/video and used the rubber grommet to add friction the wooden platform set on top, which was a simple thin 12in/30cm disk of wood bought at hobby lobby for a few dollars, on which I glues white paper.

so if you have questions don't hesitate, and I'll try to answer to the best of my recollection.

The trigger mechanism 

I was given a Triggertrap dongle for a birthday or christmas, didn't use often but came in very handy with this setup, basically its a small wired device that connects to your iphone and to your DSLR camera. and among different option, there is one to trigger the camera when a vibration happens on your phone, so I used that to my advantage, used that smaller lego motor to built a side cart that would hold my phone, and that I could shake thanks to the EV3 code and motor, thus triggering the camera.

I also have a remote trigger for my flashes that sits in the hot shoe of my camera that triggers the flash when the camera takes a picture. something I do in all my photoshoot.

And finally a usb cable from my camera to my computer that uploads directly to Adobe Lightroom (where I had setup a preset that did some preliminary editing, making the background pure white out of the box, since the product would be in a brochure and white background website, and making it blend perfectly)

So if there was any issue I would see it right away. (like my flashes battery going down)

The EV3 Code

I don't have it anymore, but it was pretty strait forward.

Basically as soon as the start button was pressed on the computer (I could have used one of the lego pressure sensor, but wanted least amount of cable as possible, and was controlling the EV3 through bluetooth) 

1. Set number of step wanted in a variable (24 for pretty smooth 360 rotation )
2. Rotate the big motor at low speed for a set number of degrees (360/number of steps wanted)
3. Wait a quarter second or so to be sure nothing is moving.
4. Give a shake to the small motor to trigger the camera (shakes the iphone which triggers the camera thanks to the Triggertrap dongle, and flashes goes off automatically thanks to the flash remote sitting in the camera hot shoe, and finally picture is sent to my computer automatically, setup with Lightroom or Canon software)
5. wait a second or two, so that the camera takes the picture
6. repeat until number of step wanted are over.
7. switch products and start again

Once everything worked flawlessly, I built a giant white box out of large paper I had, lots of tape involved...

setup 5 flashes inside and outside the box to make the white background as white as possible (and then made it flawless in lightroom)
 

This is a quick video before the lightbox was built, and the side card was improved after I build the Lightbox, as it wasn't perfect yet.

 

Sorry I didn't document it better, because I simply didn't know there was a big community of AFOL I could share this project with

Edited August 3, 2017 by Squirrelf

[Jim]

Hi,

Sorry for my late reply. Very interesting story. I have been looking into professional turntables as well, but they are pretty expensive. I found an "affordable" one though. The Foldio360 is around 150 euros at the moment. It's not very big though.

Using your "phone shake" to trigger the camera is a very nice solution. Awesome!

[doug72]

Lighting for taking Videos & Photos

Normally I wait for a bright sunny day and open the blinds to get good lighting for taking videos, but with the advent of winter the sun is very weak.

Most of the light bulbs in my house are low energy mini fluorescent which give a poor light for taking videos - picture are very yellow orange even with using a white background.

I now have a 60W LED daylight dimmable light bulb which gives excellent lighting at any time day or night, also prevents eye strain when building.

See comparison photos.

Edited December 1, 2018 by Doug72

[shadow_elenter]

Good lighting is the key to good video's.
I once made the investment to buy 2 filming lights and I haven't regretted it for a moment!
I had the same issue with lots of shadows and yellow look.
Before I bought the lights I made THIS, and after THIS the difference is night and day!

PS: yay post #200!

 

Edited December 1, 2018 by shadow_elenter

[ifilin]

My choice - 2 not expensive 500 Watts lamps. :)

And examples of photos without edit - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ifilin/albums

[Zerobricks]

I use Foldio3 ( http://orangemonkie.com/foldio3/), which is great for smaller models and huawei P20 pro phone to make photos and record video.

[MxWinters]

46 minutes ago, ifilin said:

My choice - 2 not expensive 500 Watts lamps. :)

And examples of photos without edit - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ifilin/albums

Haha, I'm glad someone uses halogen lamps, much safer than those toxic fluorescent lamps. Providing that one doesn't keep them burning for hours on end, they are kinder the environment than LED's too with their transformers/drivers and complex circuitry that some of them have. At least with halogens you are guaranteed a CRI of 100% unlike fluorescents and LED's. They also save you from keeping the heating on for so long as well .

Edited December 1, 2018 by MxWinters
Typo

[Splat]

If your photos are coming out too 'yellow orange', perhaps you can adjust the white balance of your camera accordingly.  Most (all?) digital cameras will let you do this - check your camera settings or read the manual.

I'm not sure which camera/flash you are using, but in your flash example it seems that either something was blocking the flash, the flash was too far away from the subject, or the flash was set to a very low level.

In your last example with the daylight bulb you are still getting harsh shadows.  I would recommend using multiple diffuse light sources to get better results.  If you only have one light, you can use a white piece of card to 'bounce' some light back into your model from the other side to fill in the shadows a little bit.

My recommendation for the best way to get decent photos is to use a sturdy tripod or other similar support for your camera.  This will allow you to take decent photos with a wide variety of lighting conditions.

As an example, I have even managed to take great looking photos using just a very low powered flashlight/torch with an incandescent bulb to light the model (that's all that I had access to at the time).  I set my camera's white balance to match the colour temperature of the flashlight/bulb (to get 'white' whites), used a tripod for my camera, and set my camera to a long exposure (30 seconds).  I then used the flashlight/torch to 'paint' light onto the model from various angles over the 30 second exposure time.  Continuously moving the flashlight/torch helped to eliminate any harsh shadows.  This just goes to show that you don't 'need' fancy lighting setups to light your models, but they do help to make things quicker and more predictable.

[Jim]

3 hours ago, Zerobricks said:

I use Foldio3 ( http://orangemonkie.com/foldio3/), which is great for smaller models and huawei P20 pro phone to make photos and record video.

I almost got that one too. 

2 hours ago, Splat said:

If your photos are coming out too 'yellow orange', perhaps you can adjust the white balance of your camera accordingly.  Most (all?) digital cameras will let you do this - check your camera settings or read the manual.

Yup. Or simply shoot RAW and correct in Lightroom (or your preferred software).