It can be hard knowing what to look for in a digital photography studio. If you need to book a professional photography studio these days, it seems that you need to know an awful lot of technical jargon just to understand the brochures or web pages.
Whether you're scratching your head over what on earth an infinity cove is (perhaps a very large natural harbour somewhere on the south coast?) or wondering what a megapixel might look like, then read on to discover in plain English what you're likely to find in a digital photography studio, why it might be of benefit to you and your business, and how to choose a professional photography studio based upon your business' actual needs rather than the quantity of jargon found in the lavishly produced and extremely colourful promotional literature.
- Infinity Cove
An infinity cove is an essential feature within any decent digital photography studio, especially one which produces a range of commercial photography solutions. Effectively an infinity cove is a smoothly curving wall, usually plain white. It has no edges, no corners, no joins, seams or other features, producing what becomes a completely featureless and consistent background.
This is essential in order to achieve a number of things, from creating packshot images which allow the product photograph to be used in ways which allow the product to stand out, to being able to replace the background digitally with another, such as taking a photograph of a motorbike against a plain white infinity cove, and then replacing this digitally with a dusty Mexican wilderness. It's a lot cheaper, quicker and easier than flying the bike and the photographer out to Mexico! Make sure that the infinity cove is of a decent size to allow anything from earrings to a settee or motorbike to be photographed. Seven metres is ideal.
- Megapixel
A megapixel is a million pixels, and a pixel is a single dot which forms part of an overall image. If you've ever looked closely at newspaper photographs you'll have noticed that they're actually made up of hundreds of small dots, and even television screens are too. Today we have HD televisions which have very much smaller dots, and many more of them, creating a picture which is fantastically detailed and sharp. The same is true with digital photography. The more megapixels a camera is capable of storing in a single image, the more detailed and sharp the result.
- Digital manipulation
Think the camera never lies? Think again! It may be fine for family snaps to be printed off exactly as the camera saw the scene, but in commercial photography every image has to speak a thousand words of sales patter in a fraction of a second. A professional digital photography studio will be capable of carrying out digital manipulation on site. This could be fairly subtle such as enhancing the colours or tweaking the shadows and lighting, or it could be much more intense, replacing the entire background, adding or removing props or placing the object within a complete scene, which itself may be entirely fabricated by computer manipulation.
- Lighting Rig
Lighting is one of the most crucial aspects of professional commercial photography, and a professional photography studio will have access to a range of lighting solutions. The type, number, colour and arrangement of lights is sometimes referred to as the lighting rig. For example, taking photographs of detailed machinery will require careful lighting to try to minimize shadows and loss of detail, whereas taking photographs of diamonds requires a careful arrangement of several LEDs, some different colours to enhance the reflections and refractions.
- Packshot
A packshot is simply a product photograph which is taken in such a way that the background is either plain white, or can be easily removed entirely allowing the product image to be superimposed on to any background. This effect is achieved by using an infinity cove (see above) in addition to an appropriate lighting rig (also see above).
- Phase One
Phase One is actually a brand, and is the make of camera equipment used by any decent professional photography studio. Whilst you can buy a fairly good digital camera off the shelf from your local computer store or photography shop, a professional digital photography studio will need to use equipment which takes digital photography several stages further in terms of picture quality, resolution and capability. Phase One is the standard, and you should look for a digital photography studio which uses these if you need the very best quality images.
- Digital Backs
Digital cameras are all very well, but sometimes you need the unique capabilities of a traditional camera instead. That's where digital backs come in to the equation, because a digital back can be attached to a standard traditional camera to allow a normal single lens camera to take a photograph, but for this image to then be instantly converted into a digital form that retains the full quality of the original photograph. A really professional digital photography studio will usually use a combination of Phase One cameras and Phase One Digital Backs.
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