Just starting out

[Picnose]

Hi all, I know absolutely nothing about photography but I am going to attempt to learn how to take a specific type of shot. I am a ceramic tile designer and want to display my stuff on a new website I am building. Most of my tiles are embossed border and decor tile insets glazed in gloss, or satin glazes both opaque and transparent.

The only equipment I have to work with is a Samsung ES57. (don't laugh) and although I have snapped a few half decent pics at random I now need to put the photo section together properly.

Regards composition I have had some good looking pics by placing the individual tiles onto a background of kidney bean sized white marble stones. This gives me a consistent feel to the display and is a cheap way of presenting all our colours in individual shots.( I have over three hundred colours, finishes and shades) I think I will struggle to better this setup and overall I think it looks spot on. The problem is getting the colours a good as possible.

Imagine a 3" tile in say apricot gloss laid onto a background of white marble chips.

How would you, set up the camera and lighting to get the colour spot on in this shot.

I was thinking of building some sort of small set with fixed lighting but I don't know what the criteria is for getting the photo right

How hard is it to reproduce colours accurately, is it worthwhile expectation??.

I have a limited amount of learning curve energy left now at age 58 so the anaesthetic of good simple advice would be appreciated.


Thanks in advance

[RecurrentNerve]

Lighting will probably be the most important factor here. You will need to consider whether you want reflections/highlights off the glossy surfaces etc. You will want to avoid the on-camera flash, I imagine. If you have a limited budget you may want to look into building your own light tent - a relatively simple affair, just a box with holes cut in the sides covered with a diffusing material such as white muslin or tracing paper, and a piece of white board placed inside in a curve. You then shine lights through the sides from the outside.

As for colour fidelity, ideally you need a careful calibration between your camera and monitor, but obviously this will only affect your colour fidelity. If someone looks at the website on a different monitor, which they obviously will be, they won't necessarily see the same colour as you.

Compression methods will also be a factor; formats such as GIF are colour-lossy (i.e. they limit the number of colours in the image in order to make it smaller) so you will probably want to stick to JPG or 24-bit PNG. However, you will never get the colours to match perfectly for every user; you might want to put a note on the site that colours are as close as possible but approximate. I assume differences in firing would produce slightly difference colours between batches in any case?

Everything you ever wanted to know about photography! On DPS!