How to take Good Pictures of Electronics

Sometimes there is a lot of high-albedo stuff on a circuit board

You might experiment with a polarizing filter, linear or circular

Hi John! Good idea to open this discussion. Really. To avoid shades and get the best field depth also a lens ring light (neon or cold LED ring) is a good choice to reach a good illumination, reduce the too sharp contrasts and get a good white balance.

In past I have done a project prototype that I have in plan in a not too far future to remake seriously and in a more reliable way that was just for still life and other features related to small objects, including rotation stop motion animations. Take a look to this presentation I have done with the first prototype, it shows a set of the most interesting features, including HDR.

Enrico

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Comment on Project14 | You Decide the Next Monthly Project Competition! RE: Raspberrypi high res camera RE: is arduino reliable for industrial environment for industrial application? RE: How to take Good Pictures of Electronics

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I use a copy-stand.  I illuminate with white LEDs and UV LEDs, but I could use tungsten.

That's a coincidence, I'm just waiting for arrival of a copy stand.

I got one ultra-cheap from e-bay, although I intend to use it for a parts assembly work-station in the garage. It has 4 lamps. Might swap out for LEDs as you say, the tungstens will feel hot! Don't want sweat on the SMDs : )

I'm a mediocre photographer. And I deliberately use low-tech tools for videos and photos.

If I want to show a detail of a board, I try to use the suppliers photos.

For my blogs, I try to make the photos pleasing to the eye in stead of detailed or clear.

I often mis-use an LCD screen or magnifying glass to give the picture a mystic appearance

For the last photo, I used my video editor and made a transition between video and screen capture.

I paused halfway into the transition and took a printscreen.

Nice effect the transparency of the last image. Never tried with photoshop or some photograph effect program like aperture of darkroom ?

Enrico

I never tried those. If I edit a photo, it's either with Paint for cut/pase,

or the new photo viewer in Windows10 that can enhance colour and brightness (I use that for youtube video icons, to make them brighter)

I like GIMP, fun & free!

Photographic lighting - a most interesting topic for bloggers. I keep trying all kinds of different techniques. I sometimes take items outside to get sunlight on them - much more in the past when my old camera needed more light.

I have created several LED lighting systems with varying success. This blog shows a ring light for my camera lens (in the second video). I have another system with much brighter LEDs - up to about 4000 lumens, but it creates lots of shadows.

I have a backlit glass "light table" which could be used to eliminate shadows, but it is buried in my basement. I am dating myself but I built that table to design taped PCB artwork with red, blue and black tape. It is a full drafting table size, (who even remembers drafting tables?) and it is ugly, so it is hard to find a place for it. If you have ever tried designing a PCB with tape, you will know how important a light table is in the process.

I plan to make a proper photography light box at some point - I think this will achieve the shadowless effect I sometimes want.

Here is an Idea that I use when I need to take an extreme closeup. Extreme closeups are very problematic even with a camera that is capable of focusing down to the surface of the lens. For one thing, it is very difficult to get the camera lens in as physically close as may be necessary. Secondly at some point the camera and lens begin to shade the subject. Here is a picture from the same section of board that I used above. The target subject of my picture is the "N" in NE5560N on the DIP chip.This is the closest practical distance that I can get to the board without shading the subject. If all that is important is the "N" then I have to include a lot of extraneous clutter.

The above picture was shot at a 3 mega pixel resolution but actually contains only 1 MB after compression. This is a good general purpose resolution as it is sharp enough at normal sizing. The memory size of the picture also allows for e-mail limits and other data size restrictions. In this next picture I have increased resolution to the max of the camera 20 MP and I have backed off from my target a little bit. The picture after compression contains 5.8 MB of data. Remember for the purpose of this demonstration my actual target is the "N" in NE5560N on the DIP Chip. The E-14 site will allow pictures up to 10 MB in size so this picture should upload without problems.

Since the target of my picture is the "N" I haven't accomplished much with this higher resolution picture, except now I have a lot more pixels to work with. But taking the high resolution image and trimming it down to the area of interest I am able to come up with this closeup of the "N" :

Now I have a closeup of my target that is nearly as big as the entire chip in my first picture. Since it is only part of the high resolution picture (5.8 Mp) it only has data content of 16KB and can be easily e-mailed or used in applications that are data size sensitive. I can also use it as needed without a lot of extraneous items in the picture.

John