PHOTOS

Guidelines for Project Photography
ALL OF YOUR IMAGES WILL BE UPLOADED TO YOUR BLOG POSTS. Professional photography is expensive, and worth it when you really need it. Designers submitting to competitions will sometimes pay a great deal of money for photography. They will use art directors and product stylists as well as photographers. You're not going to achieve professional results with your point-and-shoot camera. However, you can take decent product shots for communicating and documenting your design process. This page is intended to help you avoid the obvious problems with most student project photography. If you are submitting an image (e.g., a photograph, drawing, or scan of some kind), please make sure the image is about 1000 pixels on the longest side. If you submit a 3000 x 3000 pixel image, it will be very hard to view within Coursera. Here's the standard "brochure" shot for the Blackberry Pearl, shot by a professional and manipulated afterwards in Photoshop. It's in focus everywhere, the lighting is just right, there is no distracting background. (The screen was probably added in photoshop or was a printed mock-up on the physical model to begin with.)  Below is a competent snapshot of a real Blackberry Pearl. The background is a marble floor tile. This is a 600 pixel wide image. (This size works well for the web. For a brochure or other print use for class, you'll want your image to be at least 1000 pixels wide.) This was shot with a Nikon D50 digital SLR camera with a handheld flash with a diffuser on it, and aimed at the ceiling. If you do not have a flash that you can detach from your camera, then you should probably avoid flash altogether for product shots. Instead, find someplace with nice diffuse outdoor light. For example, the floor next to a big north-facing window or next to any window on a cloudy day will work well. Do not try to shoot a product in bright sunlight.  This image was shot with a Sony CyberShot DSC-W80 Point-and-Shoot Camera. It's almost as good as the image shot with the SLR camera and flash. This one was shot on a marble floor tile placed in front of a window with diffuse light coming in. I turned the flash off entirely and just let the camera do the rest. Note that the placement of the object relative to the window will dictate the location of the slight shadow. Note also that the color temperature of the lighting is a little cold. This can be adjusted in Picasa or Photoshop, but it's not bad as is.  The importance of background is evident in this otherwise fine photograph. The background is much too distracting.  Pick a neutral, relatively light background for most product shots. This is a gray t-shirt. A piece of cardboard will also work fine, as will a concrete floor or other neutral surface with limited visual pattern to it. You probably should avoid a white background unless you can control the exposure manually on your camera.  The composition of this shot is not very effective. The viewing angle is too low (unless you are trying to show the ports and buttons on the side). The standard product shot (as above) is called a 3/4 view. It is shot from above looking down on one of the front corners of the product.  <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The composition is wrong here too. Fill the frame with the product. You could crop this one to improve it, but then you would give up resolution. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This shot is overexposed. You might be tempted to do this to get a white background. A better way to get a white background is to shoot on a white background, but to not overexpose the image. Instead you cut the product out of the background in Photoshop. (There's actually a special tool for doing this in Photoshop, and pretty much all web catalog photography is done by removing the background in Photoshop.) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This one is underexposed. On many point-and-shoot cameras, you don't have direct control over exposure. (Some point-and-shoot cameras do allow exposure control via the menu. You typically push a button to increase/decrease the exposure by +1, +2, -1, -2, etc. Almost all SLR cameras and most external flash units let you fuss with exposure manually.) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">