PSP Fanboy reader, and well-known writer on the Internets, Dave Taylor writes in to ask us: "I'm wondering if any of you fanboy folk have any bright ideas about how to take decent quality screenshots of our favorite consumer electronics gizmo, the PSP? I've tried a bunch of different approaches with my Nikon digital SLR but none of them work worth beans." Fortunately for Dave, and for all of our wonderful readers, I just finished putting together a book on the PSP, and while working on that project, I spent many hours of trial and error to discover the best way to take decent quality screenshots of the PSP.
I'll try my best to cover the best ways to get a full shot of the PSP, as well as the best way to zero in on that gorgeous screen.
Read the rest after the jump...
Here's what worked for me:
- A tripod—nothing ruins the shot more than an unsteady hand. A tripod ensures that the pic will be steady and in focus. I mounted my Nikon D70 on my tripod and set the shaft as high as it could go and pointed the camera straight down for most of my shots. This way I could get a straight on shot of the entire PSP or zoom in for a close up of just the screen.
- Consistent lighting—generally the more light, the better, but it needs to be at a constant level from all directions to avoid odd shadows and glare off of the PSP's gorgeous shiny body. If you really wanted fully even light, you could get (or make) a macro light box. For my purposes, however, I simply shot in Manual mode with the flash turned off and had a nice bright lamp on nearby that provided consistent white light (I have an easel lamp that worked nicely for this). The only trick is that you have to position the light so that it illuminates the PSP nicely, but you have to be careful that from the camera's point of view that it isn't reflected on the PSP's face.
- Manually set the white point—to get the colors right in your lighting set up, place the PSP on a white surface. I used a sketchbook as my background. If your camera has white balance settings, remove the PSP and use the white background to set the white balance.
- Something to wipe the smudges off the PSP—the only thing that ruins a good, clean shot more than an unsteady hand is a nasty greasy thumb print.
- Tinker with the exposure—if you're doing a zoomed in close-up shot of just the screen, then you're going to have to find a sweet spot exposure setting that grabs the light from the screen nicely without causing any distortion or blurriness from the action going on on the screen. This is going to vary depending upon what's going on on the screen so there is no hard and fast rule.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-01-2005 @ 10:06PM
johnz said...
I have the d70 and another thing I can recommend from experience (if you don’t have studio lighting like a lot of people) is to put a flash diffuser on your slave flash. You can even have a makeshift one made from some kind of semi opaque paper. It will get rid of the glare and harsh shadows that you see in the picture above. It also is a good idea to have natural lighting and avoid flash and or incandescent lighting all together. Also, try spot metering to your hand or a grey card, metering to pure white paper might have thrown the exposure just a bit. Anyway I’m not trying to sound like a know it all; just thought I would throw in some constructive comments.
P.S. the psp makes me happy, and so does this blog!
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12-02-2005 @ 9:44AM
hank said...
i agree that direct flash is harsh and unflattering, your best bet is a long exposure with existing light or tungsten (light bulbs) light and a tripod.
however i must point out that it is a common myth that flash diffusers can affect light harshness, the only 2 things that affect light harshness are distance to the light source and size of the light source. while flash dissuers may have some effect of slightly increasing the size of the light source and reducing intensity, the softening effect is usually negligable.
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