The primary purpose is to post to the web. Thanks for your help!! I have a Fugi s7000 that takes great macro shots. It has two different macro settings that are there at a touch of a button. Touch the button twice and you can get within 1/2" of an item you are photographing.
The Fugi s9000 and the Fugi s5200 also have macro focus down to 1cm (about 1/2") The S9000 will be more than $300 but the s5200 should be well under $300.
The best site I have found for camera comparisons is the link below. The Cannon S3 is listed as 10cm/0cm in the Macro column. You will need to verify what that means, but it may mean that it has two macro settings, one that literally allows you to take a pic with something set on the lens.
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Ca...
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Fu...
The site is great. I was able to copy all of the info into an excel spreadsheet, and add a few cells or take a few away, and all of the info would line up from camera to camera. It made comparison very easy!
Looks like you could pick up a Fugi s5200 for $236
Incidentally, we've had our s7000 for several years and have taken over 25,000 digital pics with it. The s7000 only came with 6x optical zoom and there are many times I wish I had more. 6x was about the max at the time. The s7000 also uses AA NiMH batteries so they are cheap to replace! There are many other nice feature. It was one of the best buys I ever made. Back then I got it for $500. I think they stopped making it though when they came out with the s9000. The s5200 is a good cheaper version that has most of the same features but fewer mega pixels. Oh, I just noticed the s5200 has 10x optical zoom! Virtually all of the other features are identical.
Good luck! Any point & shoot less than 3x zoom
test it at the store.
or one with the ability to add attachements such as the Kodak P850 with a macro kit. Try a canon powershot 6.0 megapixels. It's pretty good and $199 at office depot If you are not going to go with a DSLR, almost any point and shoot with a macro mode will serve you well. The thing is, I feel that you need to use the flash to force the aperture to close while still having enough light for an exposure. Many here will tell you different, but follow this advice and see what you think.
Use your macro setting and experiment. Let's say you have a point and shoot camera with macro and a flash on the camera. You might have to go to a manual mode to do this, but...
Put your coin on a nice background surface. I like to just put it on the inside of a sweatshirt! Zoom out at least half-way so that you will be working about a foot away from the coin. Be sure that you get focus confirmation. Shoot a picture USING flash. Check the LCD for the result. If you have overexposed the coin, use the EV adjustment to reduce the exposure. For small items, I often find that I need to reduce the exposure by about 1.0 EV. (That's -1.0 EV.) It is better to have the coin properly exposed and the background underexposed, so just worry about the coin for now. Using a deliberate underexposure will cure the "too shiny" appearance of the coin, but also try to shoot a little "off axis" instead of directly at the coin. This way the light won't bounce straight back into the camera and ruin your image.
If you know how, you can use either full manual exposure or just Aperture Priority and choose a smaller aperture (larger number) to make the ring show up in better focus.
If you are doing any image processing at all, such with Photoshop or it's cousins, you can crop the image to 800 pixels by 800 pixels and use Supersize images on eBay. I always use the Picture Pack when I am selling anything of any value.
Check out http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/hear... which I did a while ago using a Nikon Coolpix 5400 exactly as described above. I do NOT think this is acceptable, but we decided not to sell the ring anyhow, so I didn't bother to do a better job. It's still better than some I've seen. I don't keep old photos of sold items around, so I don't have much to show you, but at least you know that it's possible to get an acceptable result even without spending huge dollars on your equipment.
The key things to remember are:
-Macro setting
-Zoom out to get about a foot away from your subject
-Use flash
-Try different EV settings and expect that you will end up with a negative EV setting, such as -1.0 EV.
Here are a couple of coin photos done exactly as described:
http://www1.snapfish.com/slideshow/Album...
http://www1.snapfish.com/slideshow/Album...
Here are a couple more auction photos done as described:
800 x 800 http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/york...
800 x 800 http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/mont... |
