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How to take Good Pictures of Electronics

jw0752

Recently I posted a couple of pictures that fell short of being the quality that I was looking for. was kind enough to send me some excellent tips on camera settings. I thought it might be helpful to everyone if we all share some of the tips and techniques that we use to get good quality pictures of our projects and builds. This will hopefully get the conversation going and we can add to it as ideas and techniques begin to flow back and forth.

 

Here is my first Tip:

 

When I try to take a picture of a circuit board that is layed out flat on my bench I have difficulty with shadows frm my body and camera. I also experience difficulty eliminating flare on the circuit board from the over head lights. By propping the circuit board at an angle to the lighting it is much easier to avoid the shadows and the flare. In these pictures I am using a hockey puck to prop the board up.

 

image

 

image

These pictures were shot at f3.5  1/30th of a second exposure.

 

John

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  • 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.

     

    image

     

    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.

     

    image

     

    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" :

     

    image

     

    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

Reply

  • 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.

     

    image

     

    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.

     

    image

     

    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" :

     

    image

     

    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

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