Digital camera, which?

Question

Digital camera, which?
I want to take photos of earrings and things close up and clear like the ones on eBay. Mine just come out blurry or just crap because of the flash glare. Can anyone tell me what one to buy to take great photos like this one

Answer

A DSLR with a macro lens is the pro way to go, but this is not at all needed for eBay. Pretty much any point and shoot with a macro setting will do nicely.brbrUse your macro setting and experiment. Lets 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...brbrPut your ring on a nice background surface. I like to just put it in a ring box. Zoom out at least halfway so that you will be working about a foot away from the ring. Be sure that you get focus confirmation. Shoot a picture USING flash. Check the LCD for the result. If you have overexposed the ring, use the EV adjustment to reduce the exposure. For small items, I often find that I need to reduce the exposure by about . EV. Thats . EV. It is better to have the ring properly exposed and the background underexposed, so just worry about the ring for now. Using a deliberate underexposure will cure the quottoo shinyquot appearance of the stones and metal.brbrIf 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.brbrIf you have a DSLR, post your question again stating the kind of camera that you have and the lens that you are using and we will give more details.brbrIf you are doing any image processing at all, such with Photoshop or its cousins, you can crop the image to pixels by pixels and use Supersize images on eBay. I always use the Picture Pack when I am selling anything of any value.brbrCheck out httpwww.members.aol.comswfheara which I did a while ago using a Nikon Coolpix exactly as described above. I do NOT think this is acceptable, but we decided not to sell the ring anyhow, so I didnt bother to do a better job. Its still better than some Ive seen. I dont keep old photos of sold items around, so I dont have much to show you, but at least you know that its possible to get an acceptable result even without spending huge dollars on your equipment.brbrThe key things to remember arebrMacro settingbrZoom out to get about a foot away from your subjectbrUse flashbrTry different EV settings and expect that you will end up with a negative EV setting, such as . EV. brbrHere are a couple more auction photos done as describedbrbr x httpwww.members.aol.comswfyorkabr x httpwww.members.aol.comswfmonta