In order to optimize your camera for product photography, it’s pretty simple, like with just about every picture, I’m going to leave this in the program mode.

I don’t want to use the flash because with product photography I use a simple home set up with a couple desk lamps. My ISO can stay at 80, because if I press my shutter button halfway and see that my shutter speed is fast enough and so I can hand hold the shot and I don’t even need a tripod. You may want to consider using a tripod if your shutter speed is a bit slower. Especially if you need to have everything from front to back in focus, you need to have a smaller aperture. But for now I’m going to stick to ISO 80. Go ahead and press the quick menu button just so we can review the menu. The wide balance is currently set to auto wide balance and that’s no good. I want to have the most accurate color possible so I can do one of two things.

One thing I can do is just choose the wide balance setting, the best suits my situation. You don’t have fluorescent in here and that’s actually what I’m using right now or a couple fluorescent lights. So that option is not relevant in my case. But what I can do is set the custom wide balance and this is actually preferred because this will choose the most accurate color temperature possible. Down here, it says to put the display button so I’ll do that. And now I’ll just need to focus my square on a blank white sheet of paper that’s in my scene. Right now my background happens to be just plain so I’ll go ahead and turn that up and then press the set button in the middle. It’ll calibrate the picture and now picture in the camera is calibrated properly for this scene. So I’ve got my wide balance customized, my ISO’s at 80 and my flash is turned off.

If you’re not using a tripod you can do this very easily just like with any picture, go ahead and focus on the subject, press the shutter button halfway and then you can recompose and take the picture. Right now you’ll notice that my aperture is down at F2.8 and if I wanted everything from front to back to be in focus, I’m going to need to change that. Just go ahead and release the shutter button and use the quick menu joystick to change those values. You want to need to hold that down, that’s pretty good, I can still hand hold 180th of a second and F6.3 should be fine for my scene. Go ahead and refocus on your target, reposition the camera and you can go ahead and take your picture. Now if

I am using a tripod because I don’t have too much light, and what you may want to do is just move your focusing bracket. Because you want to compose first and then focus so you won’t be able to move the camera so easily. So what you can do, is a little focus button right up here at the top next to your zoom lever, press that, and you’ll get these arrows. You can use your quick menu joystick or the navigation buttons to move that around, go ahead and press set and now with my picture composed, I can press the shutter button halfway, focus right on my target and then press it the rest of the way to take the picture.

If you’re too close to the subject, you may need to use the macro mode. Very simple, just go ahead and move your focusing switch down to macro. This will allow you to focus even closer on your subject. Right now, I’m about a foot or 30 centimeters away from my subject and I still don’t need the macro focus. The camera’s able to focus and that’s actually very good. So I don’t need the macro setting, even though turning it on isn’t going to hurt anything, I can still press the shutter button halfway and find the focus point. So remember, customize your wide balance, set the ISO to 80 to maintain the cleanest image possible. If you need to use a tripod go ahead and do so. If you want everything in focus, use the quick menu joystick to push and pull the aperture and shutter settings and you may need to use the macro setting. All the other settings are just fine, go ahead and press the shutter button halfway again, focus on your target, and take the picture.

To find out much more about Digital Photography and your Digital Camera, go to LBGuides.com.