NettieM houses project continued

Earlier this year, in May 2014, when NettieM asked for a few photos of her houses project. Since then she had produced many more. In this instance it was an opportunity for me to trial a more technically ambitions process. Here are some notes.

1. Carefully set up the tabletop so that the immediate background is perfect white.
2. Fine tune the lighting to work for light and dark subjects.
3. Configure the camera and laptop as a tethered shoot, with a cropped image area to get good speed performance, in RAW.
4. Shoot each house individually from a common spot on the table.
5. Use batching to crop, curve adjust, saturation, etc. and export to jpg.
6. Open as layers in photoshop/gimp.
7. Use the magic wand and free select tool, set to the same feather setting (4px), to remove the backgrounds.
8. Play around with copies of the file.

In essence this was a highly systematized shoot as would normally be applicable catalog products, but applied to fine art ceramics. There are several advantages to doing it this way.

1. You can rearrange the subjects any way you like later.
2. You can create large crisp high resolution composites, with pixel resolutions that exceed normal photography (100MP plus, compared to 40MP of a normal shot).
3. All items just happen to be catalog ready or can be curated into styles and favorites, as creative ideas are identified down the track.