History

I recently returned from a really great vacation during which I had the opportunity to take my family to visit The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan. (I highly recommend a visit if you have any interest in American history — not just automotive.)

One thing that caught my eye was adjacent to the display of a full-scale operational replica of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis aircraft. (The real one is in the Smithsonian.) There was a cabinet of promotional products commemorating the flight and advertising for some businesses who saw the historic flight across the ocean as a marketing opportunity.

It was hard to get a decent photo of the items in the glass case, but hopefully you can get the gist.

It was very interesting to see how much promotional products have changed, and how much they have stayed the same.

Product Photography: Part 2

In the last post, I covered some basic tips on capturing better images of products you need for photos. This time, things are going to get a little more advanced.

A Little Space

You don’t need a pro photo studio to get very usable results, but if you’re going to be shooting more than a handful of images, a homemade “table top studio” can make some very noticeable improvements in your images.

For most promotional items, you’ll want to have a table you can place items onto. This can be simply an available table or desk from around your office, a small piece of plywood spanning a pair of collapsible sawhorses, or a cart of some sort.

The background needs to be something that won’t distract from your subject. This can be pretty much anything solid-colored. Stiff paper or pasteboard works well, or some people prefer fabric. You can lay it on the table (with the subject on it), then bend it up onto the wall behind the table so it looks like a continuous background with no definition of where the horizontal table surface meets the vertical wall.

Lighting

Good lighting makes a huge difference. You can use a pair of regular desk lamps and get surprisingly good results. Use the “curly” CFL fluorescent bulbs, since you can usually get a lot more light without overstepping the listed wattage limit of a cheap desk lamp. I highly recommend getting the “daylight” version of these bulbs, as the color of the light they put out looks much more natural in photography. Another nice benefit of the CFL bulbs is that they don’t get nearly as hot as the traditional incandescents.

Once you have light sources, you’ll need to diffuse them. Some of the best diffusing I’ve found is some white nylon fabric that allows a lot of the light to shine through, but cuts way back on the harshness. In a pinch, I’ve even used some nylon screenprinting mesh, but it can take a couple layers of that, depending on what grade of mesh you have. This material gets draped over or clamped to the lamp so it covers the bulb and reflector. The result you want to get is to soften shadows. You can test this easily by holding your open hand in the lit area and then holding a finger from your other hand about 3″ above it (between your open hand and the light source). If you see a distinct shadow of your finger cast onto your open hand, then the light is not diffuse enough. If the shadow is very soft, fuzzy, or blurry, you’re good-to-go.

This photo, taken in bright sunlight shows a very distinct, sharp-edged shadow cast. This is a very good indicator of harsh lighting.

In this photo, taken in our tabletop studio, the cast shadow is nearly indistinguishable. This will allow much better highlight and shadow tones for the kinds of images we're trying to create.

If you find yourself doing more than a couple dozen photos a week, you might consider something like this tabletop studio we purchased a few years ago. We’ve gotten loads of use out of ours, and it stays semi-permanently on a rolling cart. This solves the “space” and the “lighting” issues very nicely.

Here is our Table Top Studio set up.

Aperture

Setting the aperture (“f-stop”) to a very high number (like f/22) will keep more of your subject in focus. If you’ve ever dealt with having the front part of your subject in sharp focus, but the back corners are getting blurry, this is how to fix that.

The trade-off is that this tight aperture needs more time to let enough light in to be able to expose the image. So the shutter will need to stay open longer. This might mean your shutter will need to be open for a half-second or more. That’s plenty of time to allow for all kinds of camera shake if you’re not using a tripod!

For this item, a DSLR camera makes things much easier to use. You can still do this with a point & shoot camera, but those weren’t really made for this. It’ll be a much less-than-ideal situation. I’ve personally had more success with doing this in full-manual mode on the DSLR camera I use here at Numo, but setting it to Aperture Priority works ok. It took some time trying out different shutter speeds when I first got it all set up, but since I always use the same lighting and “table top studio”, I can  use the same settings nearly all the time.

I suppose there are probably some other things we could discuss on this subject, but at this point it would come down to things more specific to what you would do compared to someone else. I mentioned before that I’m certainly no expert, but feel free to ask questions in the comments below or email me. I’ll be glad to share what little I do know.

Product Photography: Part 1

Good product photography can make a really big difference in the professionalism of any presentation. I certainly don’t consider myself a pro photographer, but there are a few things I’ve learned shooting photos of Numo product over the past decade or so. Perhaps some of this will be helpful in getting you better images, whether those images are destined for a website, a sales presentation, a printed flyer or catalog or just an email.

Most of this doesn’t require a fancy digital SLR camera, but there are some real advantages to having one of those. I might talk about that in a future post.

Turn Off the Flash.

The main thing that has helped me is to make sure I have a camera that I can turn off the flash, and use a sturdy tripod. The flash puts harsh highlights on the subject, and it typically casts nasty shadows of the product onto the surface behind the product.

Most cameras use an icon similar to this when the flash is turned "off".

Use a Tripod.

Since you’re not using the flash, the camera has to keep the shutter open longer to properly expose the image. Unless you are taking photos outdoors during the daytime, you probably can’t hold the camera steady enough to keep it from shaking while the picture is being captured. Using a tripod steadies the camera to allow for a very long exposure time.

Another benefit of the tripod is that you can keep the camera in the same position for many photos. This allows for consistency in your images, and allows you to take several photos of the same item by only changing the position or rotation of the item. If you’re shooting several items, you can place them all in the same spot and keep the same relative position of the camera. Leave the tripod in place for weeks on end if you’re having to shoot many items. Just detach the camera when you need to use it for something else.

Zoom In, Then Back Up.

Here’s one that a lot of people scratch their heads about when I tell them, but the few that get it really find it useful. Set the zoom on your camera to where the least amount of the image is showing in the view. For small “point & shoot” cameras, this will mean holding down the “T” (telephoto) button until it stops. For an SLR camera, you’d turn the zoom ring on the lens until it stops. A couple quick points, though:

• Make sure that “digital zoom” is turned off. (This will be in the menus of a point & shoot camera; check your user manual for your specific camera. This is irrelevant on a digital SLR.)
• If your camera has an “ultra zoom” or similar feature (more than about 7x), you might need to back off on the zoom if you’re running out of space.

Once you’ve zoomed in, back up until the item you’re shooting fills about 80% of the view in the larger direction.

This photo was taken with the camera's zoom set to a wide angle, and the camera relatively close to the subject.

This photo has the water bottle taking up a similar amount of the image, but the camera was zoomed in ("tele"), and the camera was further from the subject. The proportions of the bottle look much more natural.

What this does is to minimize the distortion of the image due to perspective. I won’t get into a technical discussion of this, but on a practical level, the vertical sides of a cylindrical or rectangular object will be almost parallel rather than tapering toward one another as they get farther away from the camera. If you are planning to use your photos for virtual samples where you’ll be digitally adding an imprint later, this makes things much easier to do so.

So those are the basics. Next post will be about some more advanced tips.

Even More Productivity Tools

Here are a couple more helpful things I’ve been using lately in my digital life.

This suggestion is one I don’t use as much as I used to, but is still something I highly recommend: Fluid app. This app lets you create what is basically a web browser that’s limited to a particular site. You can create as many of these “site-specific browsers” (SSBs) as you need. These SSBs show up on your computer like a regular app, so they can all live separately in your Mac’s dock, behaving like individual desktop apps. Doing this quarters these web-based tools out of your regular browser, and you can use it to have several instances of the same tool open (like different Gmail accounts, or logging into the same site as multiple users). I was using one for each of my Gmail accounts and another for Google Reader. I still use one for my Google Calendar.

Reeder has been a popular RSS feed reader for iPhone and iPad for a while, and it’s recently come available on the Mac. I’ll quickly admit that this tool may not offer much advantage over Google’s very nice web-based interface (running in a Fluid SSB, no less!)… unless you’re into keyboard commands and/or you use one of the newer Mac trackpads with gestures. (More on that in a sec.) If you don’t know about RSS feeds, but you read a lot of websites that add new content frequently, you’d do well to take a look. Basically, it’s a notification system that pulls in the articles from blogs or sites you’ve subscribed to, and puts them all in one place. This lets you sort through them much more quickly than going out to each site and checking for new material yourself.

Finally, I have to mention a hardware piece I’ve recently been using: Apple’s Magic TrackPad. I use a desktop computer, but I haven’t had a “traditional” mouse connected to it pretty much ever. My main pointing device has been a Wacom tablet nearly as long as I’ve been using computers, but this new Magic Trackpad has been great addition. Notice I didn’t say, “replacement”. I don’t use it like many people would, since I still keep the Wacom pen in my right hand, but I use the trackpad for gestures with my left hand. Scrolling, panning and zooming, and rotating, and navigating emails happens almost like they are physical objects. It sorta feels like that interface Tom Cruise used in Minority Report! I’ve even started to use Exposé more.

Now, Mac OSX 10.7 “Lion” is due out in a few weeks, so we’ll see how much that changes any of this. I know I’m going to hold off on the upgrade until I know Adobe apps will play nice, but there are a few things I’m looking forward to in the new OS.

More Useful Tools

I thought I’d mention a new app that I’ve discovered since my last “tools” post.

Google has really put out a nice, useful tool in their Gmail browser-based interface. However, I’ve piped my personal account into Apple’s Mail app for years because I liked having keyboard commands rather than pulling my hands off the keyboard to send messages or attach files. (I know there are key commands available in the Gmail web interface, but they are not consistent with other desktop-based systems.) On the other hand, I really preferred Gmail’s way of displaying message threads compared to Apple’s. I also liked Gmail’s “labels” over Mail’s “folders”. When Numo switched over to Google Apps for our mail handling, I was even more torn between the web interface and the desktop app.

Enter Sparrow. Now, this app isn’t for everyone, but I really like it a lot. It removes a lot of the clutter associated with traditional mail client apps, but brings in everything I like about Gmail… but with my beloved desktop-style key commands. I can also drag-and-drop files onto the Sparrow dock icon to automatically attach them to a new message (just like Apple Mail). This is a huge win for me, since probably half of my outgoing emails have attachments. Yes, you can drag-and-drop into the Gmail interface, but not until after you’ve (1)switched over to Gmail, then (2)created a new message, then (3)switched back to the Finder or wherever you’re getting your file.

Another nice thing about Sparrow is that it has a system of trackpad gestures built-in to make flying through emails a breeze, whether your hands are on the keyboard or the trackpad.

If you use Gmail, Google Apps, or pretty much any other IMAP mail, Sparrow is definitely worth a look.

Bonus Mac tip: You know that little icon that shows up next to the file name at the very top of a document window? Click and hold on it for about a half-second, and you can drag it to the Sparrow (or Mail) dock icon to create a new message with that file attached. No need to navigate to a file that’s already open! You can also Command-click on the file name in the document window header and navigate the folder structure it’s located in.

I have a couple other things to mention in my next post. Keep an eye out for it!

Remember Using A Mouse?

"Computer?"

Yesterday, a designer I follow on Twitter commented on the fact that everyone at his workplace had received a mousepad with the company’s new mission statement printed on it. Some may view this as a clever promotional product, and there was a day when it would’ve been. This designer’s tweet was almost lamenting the apparent out-of-touch nature of his employer. The few people in his department that still actually used a mouse didn’t actually use mouse pads… and hadn’t for nearly a decade.

Recent announcements from Apple, Inc. and others in the tech industries would suggest even more paradigm changes are upon us. Remembering to save your work often (Aw, man! Power went down for a couple minutes and I lost the last 2 hours of work!), slogging through document-sharing issues (Do you have the latest revision of that NDA?), syncing data across multiple devices (I don’t have that file with me on this computer.), etc. These are all about to be things that, well,  used to be.

It’s very obvious that folks are starting to use digital devices differently (notice I didn’t say, “more“) than they have in even the very recent past. Y’know… back when we used to use a mouse with the computer!

But I think there’s a bigger picture here. I think we need to look beyond these changes and see them as indicators of the changing way people interact with the world around them.

A recent podcast I listened to even had the host and his guest considering that “intelligence” itself might be changing. It’s no longer relevant to remember a colleague’s phone number, or how to spell Tucson, or how many wives Henry VIII had beheaded — or how much a widget costs. In our constant-connectedness, we can get to that data without getting up from the dinner table. Rather than needing to know facts and figures, the intelligent person would know understand more abstract things like how those facts are (or were at the time) relevant.

So it’s really tough to keep up with what an effective advertisement or promotion could be. There are obvious things like making sure your website and other content don’t break when accessed from a mobile device… But deeper than that, I wonder if using tangible goods as advertisement might be more effective now than ever. As we fast-forward our DVR’s past the commercials and scroll past the web banners, our attention is much harder to catch. A useful item that I’ll use frequently is more likely than ever to give me a positive view of your brand… just make sure it is well-considered. In other words, not a mouse pad.

Magic Mugs

In our 2011 catalog, we included some brief articles about some of the technical aspects of how we can add your message to our products. There’s a bit of text on Magic Mugs, and I’d like to expand on that a bit.

In case you aren’t already familiar, Magic Mugs make use of “thermochromatic ink”. This means, in our case, that opaque black ink can become transparent  — effectively, it disappears — when the mug it’s printed on gets hot.

If you are thinking of using “Magic” on an upcoming promo concept, it helps to think of the Magic ink as a separate layer above all the rest of your imprint.  Imagine having your art, without the magic ink, printed onto a surface, then print the Magic ink portion on a piece of clear film. Lay the film over the art for the “room temperature” iteration of the Magic Mug, and remove the film for the “hot” iteration. That’s how you need to think of the way Magic ink works.

Here are some further things to think about regarding Magic ink:

• Magic ink comes only in black. It must cover the underlying art, then disappear to reveal what’s beneath. This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Magic ink. You cannot switch from one imprint to another. You can creatively give the appearance of switching things out by having a portion of the black ink that’s covering some art disappears to reveal what’s below.
• Magic ink must be the last thing printed on the mug. You cannot print other colors on top of the Magic ink. (Although it is possible to knock out some Magic ink to allow other colors to show through, even in the cold/opaque stage.)
• Magic ink can be printed over four-color process sublimation, but there must be a greater tolerance for registration of the Magic ink with the underlying art.
• Magic ink becomes opaque again when the mug cools back down to room temperature. The effect gets repeated each time the mug cools and gets hot again.