Make Extra Money Online From Micro Stock Photography Part 3
Many have asked me on how to take photos of a subject with seamless white background that makes the subject stands out and isolated. Most of the time, this type of photos sell very well since the one buying them can easily cut out the subject from the background. In short, it can easily be manipulated, and that’s why people love photos of subject isolated on white or black background. If you want to make money online from selling photos, this is one of the types of photo that you must include in your portfolio.
Since I don’t have the money to buy all those hi-tech stuff such as the lighting probes and softbox, I ended up constructing my own home made studio using items already lying around in my house, with some extras of course. What you need is basically
1) A box
2) Tracing paper
3) Sticky tapes/glue
4) Construction light/tungsten light
5) Cardboard paper for background
6) Knife/scissors
Since I got this idea from Johan Mattson’s blog, I think it’s better to go to his blog and follow the steps that he describes there. It’s basically the same thing that I did, and I even bought the same construction lights. To quote what he said
Step 1:
Cut out three sides of the cardboardbox. (see images below)Step 2:
Cut and tape the white translucent paper on the sides that you juts cut out.Step 3:
Put the background paper in place, you can use a bit of tape to kind of “hang it up” in the back of the box.
Here are some pictures of my setup
The background of the photo that you get from this setup is not completely white, so you need to tweak the level a bit in photoshop by following these steps
1. Open up your photo in photoshop
2. Next, select ‘Layer’ -> ‘New adjustment layer’ -> ‘Level..’
3. Give your level layer a name, any name will do
4. When the level dialog is opened, select the white point sampler tool as shown below
5. Next, left click on the background so that the background is set to become THE white (in technical terms, the background is set to the value of 255 and everything else is sampled accordingly)
6. The image below shows the result after setting the area circled in red as the white point
You can try clicking around different areas of the background to get the correct brightness and exposure. You don’t want the photo to be too bright or overexposed otherwise you’ll lose a lot of details. Getting the right exposure while shooting the subject is essential. Normally, I purposely set the exposure to be +1 stop or +2 stops overexposed depending on the subject.
Hopefully I’ve explained enough in this post. I would’ve made a video of my workflow if I have the right tools (i.e camcorder and software like Camtasia) but I think you get the picture. Good luck and happy shooting!
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Thanks for this series of posts.
Stock photography was something I was very interested a long time ago when I got out of high school. I got stuck in portrait photography instead for over 20 years. Your post came up at just the right time.
I’ll be using you aff. link for Shutterstock in a few weeks as soon as other things are finished up.
James
rofl this is such a great idea..and you would never guess how ghetto rigged it really was; thx for the tip
Make Extra Money with Micro Stock Photography Part 3…
Many have asked me on how to take photos of a subject with seamless white background that makes the subject stands out and isolated. Most of the time, this type of photos sell very well since the one buying them can easily cut out the subject from the …