Hi all,
As part of the educational offerings of the Guild I formed several years ago for professional and aspiring artists and artisans, I teach a series of classes on how to take professional level photos of art and craft work. As someone noted, I post on my web site even photographically poor shots if they serve a purpose I am after. But, for submission to a juried show, or to try to get a distant gallery to carry your work, or to attract an agent on the other side of the country/world, the photos must be professional quality. For our purposes here they need to be good quality and illustrate a point, but they do not need to be of great quality.
When students ask the kinds of questions discussed in this thread, I try to get them past all the stuff about sensor size, brand name and numbers of pixels and get them to "focus" instead on what I find to be the three really important items for taking photos of things; 1) the quality of the lens, 2) the quality of the lighting and 3) live preview. These would not necessarily be the top things for taking photos of people or scenics, but for studio work photographing products they are critical. Very few even professional photographers do product photography so don't expect the person behind the counter at a store or your friend who does weddings to know much about this subject or to concentrate on these three, what I consider to be critical items. They will instead lead you to a discussion about the things that are important to them for the kind of work they do.
The quality of the lens is more important for a digital camera than for a film camera as the lens must be able to resolve to a finer point and smaller circle of resolution than on film since most sensors are smaller than most films. A really great lens designed for a 4 x 5 field camera would product rotten results on most of todays digital cameras. Some great lenses designed for 35mm film work still produce good results on digital SLR cameras, but a lot of them do not. So, buy a lens designed for digital imaging first and then find the body that works best with that lens is my advice.
You can do more for the quality of your product photographs by spending a few hundred dollars on three inexpensive studio strobe lights with light boxes than you can spending many more hundreds of dollars chasing the "professional" models of each manufacturer's camera offerings. A cheap paper backdrop on stands will also bring great bang for the buck, but it does take space and time to set up and store away again when you are through.
Live preview is a feature on DSLR cameras that allows you to see the composition on a display screen before you take the picture. The best implementations show all the adjustments real time so you can concentrate on how the light plays off of the product, where the shadows are, depth of field (focus), composition, etc. This is much harder to do peering through a tiny view finder than by observing on a display screen since the camera will often be held very high up or very low down. Live preview was once only available on a few high end DSLR cameras, but now has filtered through most manufacturer's offerings. Be sure the camera body offers manual focus and an ability to do an extreme enlargement on the live preview screen so you can do critical manual focus when depth of field is important to the shot.
Once you select a very high quality lens and a compatible body with live preview, things become much more a matter of personal choice and what else you intend to do with your camera. Nearly all DSLR camera bodies have computers capable processing very high quality digital renderings at the low ISO ratings (50 to 200) you will be using for product photography. You do not need great high ISO performance for studio work photographing your projects, but you do need a very high quality lens and the ability to see all aspects of your shot before you press the button.
I have the luxury of keeping my studio DSLR on a rolling tripod so it is available at a moments notice for shots taken while I am building real furniture projects for real customers. The studio strobe lights are also right at hand when I need them, but I have all the lights where I work color balanced to the same color temperature of my strobes (about 5500 degrees Kelven) so the white balance is correct whether I am using the strobes or not.
I seldom use that Leica studio DSLR for anything else as I prefer a smaller, lighter (and much older) swivel body Nikon for shots of people and events. When I feel like doing artsy scenics or still life work I will take the Leica because that digital Leica zoom lens is fast and simply superb. For up to 1:1 macro shots (where live preview and manual focus are again really important) I prefer a digital macro lens that is very fast and very sharp from about 1:8 to 1:1. For extreme macro work beyond 1:1 I like an older Leica macro lens on a bellows unit or extension tubes as I have yet to find any lens that can better its performance in that range.
Hope these thoughts are helpful.
Jerry
