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Taking photos of stones, what works and what does not.

It is always exciting to unpack a stone to see it in your hands for the first time. A Coticule, a stone from Japan, an Apache or Arkansas beauty or others. But sometimes we are a bit disappointed in what we have gotten when compared to what we have been waiting for when it turns out to be dull looking on our bench. Especially when on the internet it looked so vivid. Taking photos of natural objects or living beings for me is a challenge and in Auto Mode my camera sort of just takes over and does its thing so I realized that if I could standardize my background and my lighting when photographing stones I mostly standardize my results.

I bought a lightbox and lights package deal on eBay and it has helped a lot. With 4 lights (2 halogen, 2 LED) spots lights pointed up through my sidewalls of the fabric box against a foamcore ceiling, the lights get blended and bounce off the ceiling of the interior of the light box and down onto the subject area with the minimal of shadows. Day or night, rain or shine I can achieve the same lighting conditions.
I think the light box and lamps were only $24 or some stupidly inexpensive price.

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Taking photos of gray stones is pretty easy, even without the box and lights, and pure black or pure white are difficult to balance to get any detail because the monotone stone bulk make details hard to isolate in photos. Furthermore color stones with dull green asagi or kiita yellow are just different enough from each other, so my camera reads them individually but not always true to the natural overall color. I found by experiments that green stones and yellow stones are very similar in the color spectrum to blue, and that the camera would read those two stones types consistently from subject to subject, shot to shot if I added a sheet of white and one of blue paper into the composition.

My goal all along was to speed up and simplify the process by creating a "model", and to eliminate having to adjust each photo individually as little as possible. It wasn't until I found that Blue was a color that the camera read easily and consistently recognized, and that white was a standard exposure value that my photos began to standardize in the exposure phase.

I finally ended up with using two values of blue, one of fabric and one of paper into the background scene and a sheet of printer paper for the white value. Now with this set-up I do not adjust any colors in my software, but instead only adjust the brightness and contrast values, my aim is at first in setting brightness for pure white paper.



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Now when I take my photos as in the below examples, I have mechanically arranged the same 3 value targets: blue, dark blue, white as permanent, and the stone subject target as a variable. Because I take my photos not as close-ups, but instead with a wide angle lens I include a very great portion of the background blues and white, my camera compensates for this so that it is actually taking the photo with the emphasis on the blue and white values with the the minor incidental subject included. This way the color values are weighted towards the blue's and the white, the colors that are always the same from stone to stone.

The below photos, taken individually and then assembled into collage groups below were assembled from 5 shots exposed and assembled with Picasa just as they came from the camera. I did not adjust anything. The first photo I show how I set up a with this stone, taken from the exact distance that I have standardized using a 24mm lens. From this distance my camera's sensors are weighted or overloaded with blue and white, influencing the exposure toward those values as the greater or dominate although my focus in on that white scale which I remove before a normal shot is taken. I use that same plastic scale for each photo I take. The photos in the general collage made with Picasa are cropped before they are lined up. Notice that the white blank areas the white is not snowy white but instead it is a bit gray.


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Below is this same college as above but after I adjusted only the Brightness and Contrast in my Windows Office 2010 program.

Notice where in the above photos, the white is dull and gray, but below now I aimed to, with only the Brightness & Contrast adjust buttons, aimed at more of a snow white like my printer paper. Doing this brightens the colors without altering the colors but because the true target is white, the colors follow the same percentages and adjust to their natural character. For this composition I included the dollar bill as a commonly known reference with white, green and black qualities and values we here in the U.S. are familiar with.


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You might notice that the extra mass of "white" from the dollar affected the overall tone
of that exposure by maybe Factor of 1, and because the human eye is automatically drawn to a white element in a composition, if you study the background color values that Factor of 1 could maybe be halved. The dollar was only used for this demonstration, I do not use it in my normal compositions. With out the dollar you can see that all in all the color is pretty even from image to image of the stone, dry ,wet, side shot. These are acceptable for my purposes.

I hope this helps in some way.

Alex


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Alex,

I am no photographer and have no fancy set ups or cameras. Just an iPhone, and not much knowledge on how to use it photo wise either. What I did find was that on some of my colored stones in order to see the colors better I had to use a dark background and on some stones less light almost like a negative to see all the detail. While others I had to bring the light up to see the colors and contrast. I do tend to use a blue towel on a white sink area though.
 
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