Black Walnut Bowl

[Prashun Patel]

9" wide, 6" tall.
Finished with Waterlox.

I feel like I'm back to square 1 with photography.

I turned this green to finish, and it's been pretty stable (a little warping around the rim notwithstanding...)

How do I increase the detail in this picture?

[Bernie Weishapl]

Prashun that is a really nice looking bowl. Can't help ya with the picture as I am a camera dummy.

[Kathy Marshall]

Very nice bowl Prashun! I'm definitely no expert on taking pics, but it looks to me like there might be too much light and it mostly seems to be behind the bowl. Maybe Jamie will chime in, I'm sure he'll have a good answer.

[Alan Dick]

It looks to me like the photo is underexposed. You have a white background that is taking up a large part of the frame. It is common for an automatic exposure meter to underexpose the image if it is made up largely of white. If you look at the backgrond in the image, it appears yellowish grey and not white. The bowl is underexposed as a result of the camera not handling the white background. If your camera allows you to override the exposure, you could try using an exposure about 1 or 1.5 f stops greater than what the meter indicates. If this all sounds greek or if the camera does not allow the adjustment, you could either shoot the image with a grey background, or better yet get much closer to the bowl so that the white background makes up a smaller part of the image.

That will probably make the image much better, by itself. It also looks like there is a single light source way to the right of the image producing a strong sidelight. That is why the image is much darker on the left side. The left side is in shadow. If you put a white piece of poster board to the left of the bowl but out of the image, it would reflect reflect some light back onto the left side of the image, evening up the light a bit. If you can arrange it so the light is hitting the front of the bowl, from say off at about a 45,degree angle I think the image would improve even more.

This is probably more than you wanted to know, but before I spent all of my free time wrecking wood, I spent it doing photography.


I hope this helps.

Alan

[John Keeton]

Looks like nice work on the bowl, Prashun. Along with what Alan said, it seems you have ended up with a fairly small image. The data says you have a 1023 x 682 image scaled to 701 x 467, and compressed at 69%. I am not sure what software you are using to process and resize your images, but I would leave it at 1024 x 682 and compress from there.

I tweaked the image as much as I could to get this - perhaps it is a bit better. However, I can't create pixels where there are none, so much of the detail is still not there. Proper exposure is critical so that you capture as much detail as possible.

[J.D.Redwine]

9" wide, 6" tall.
Finished with Waterlox.



How do I increase the detail in this picture?

Spend more money.

[Prashun Patel]

Is this pic any better?

[Steve Schlumpf]

Yup!! Looks like a real nice Walnut bowl!! What did you do to get the colors corrected?

[Prashun Patel]

I used the background to calibrate the white balance.
Then I used some direct light facing into the tent.
Then I zoomed in a little.
Then I set the aperture and shutter speed to automatic.

Then I took 10 pix at all the different ISO settings and picked the one that looked best.
Of course, I can't remember the ISO setting that did it.

I think the biggest thing was fixing the white balance.

[Steve Schlumpf]

White balance does make a huge difference!! Also, once you get to playing around with camera settings... manually control the aperture and see how that affects your depth of field. Also - not sure if you are doing this or not, but I use a tripod and self-timer to eliminate vibration as much as possible.

[John Keeton]

Looks much better, Prashun! The image file size is still pretty small - 29KB. The upload limit is 107KB and that would give you a much crisper image with more detail. Steve Schlumpf put me on to FastStone, a free image software, and there are others. FastStone will let you compress the image to the permissible size and do other things to the image.

[Prashun Patel]

But Steve, how does depth of field matter here when we're photographing a single object?

[Steve Schlumpf]

You can have the extreme front of the form in focus and the back portion not... or you can have the entire thing in focus. You have to play games to find out what works and it usually involves moving back from the piece and then zooming in somewhat.

[Alan Dick]

This is much better. The color balance correction neutralized the color cast, and the exposure is better, probably from reducing the amount of white background in the image.Also, moving the light source had a big effect. But I think it is still a little underexposed and tweaking it a bit may improve it. The background is still grey,not white. Setting the camera on automatic and varying the iso will not make the correction you need. That will only vary the noise in the image. In a non moving image like this, the best iso will almost always be the lowest one. If the camera has an exposure compensation feature, try setting it at + 1/2. If not and you can do a manual exposure, find the exposure the camera meter recommends and then either lengthen the exposure or open the aperature by about 1/2 f stop. And Steve is right abut the tripod and self timer. This can improve sharpness, especially on longer exposures.

Alan

[Baxter Smith]

Very pretty wood and curve Prashun. The picture is much better too!

[Rick Markham]

Prashun, there is probably a button on your camera witha (+\-) that is your exposure compensation. Adjusting your white balance is a step in the right direction, but since you are shooting a subject with a white background the camera will instinctively underexpose the dark subject. You can use the (+\-) button to increase or decrease the exposure. In this case you will want to increase the exposure 1 or two stops and that will make the camera expose more for the subject. This takes a bit of tinkering, but will solve a whole bunch of real world photo issues in a quick and easy manner.

Resizing is a whole other animal and depends on the program you are using