Photographing small objects and need a background?

Create your own colours, textures or even use pictures as backgrounds.

Step 1 Make a background image on your laptop

I made this background in Photoshop, but you can use anything you like.
Save it so you can fill the screen with it in the next step.

Comments

[Puzzledd]

Clever idea. I like to photograph my sea monkeys with different backgrounds, and so far I've just used coloured paper. I'll try this- it even gives some backlighting :)

[peterbryenton]

Thanks. Let me see some of your results sometime please.

[Prfesser]

Very clever!  I have a large screen that I'll be able to use for bigger objects.  This is going to be quite useful for me!

[peterbryenton]

Pleased to hear that. Do please post some of your results.

[AngryRedhead]

Clever idea, but I can see the lines on the screen.  Maybe with a lower f-stop, it would work better?

 

[peterbryenton]

 Well spotted, thank you. You're absolutely right: setting a shallower depth of field would be the way to go. Please do let me know how you get on with that.

[peterbryenton]

P.S. There's also the risk of a Moire pattern being generated by the interaction of the screen pixels and the camera chip. Then the pixels get re-sized in the digital image editing app, so there's a whole lot going with lines in the picture.

I think any method of "defocussing" the background image is worthwhile exploring. Over to you, folks.

[Cartermarquis]

Maybe putting a piece of translucent paper/plastic over the screen to blur the image?

[peterbryenton]

Good suggestion: worth trying, thanks. Let me know how that goes, please.

[Phil B]

This is a clever way to use what you have to get what you need.

[peterbryenton]

Thank you.

[Weissensteinburg]

haha...that's pretty smart

[peterbryenton]

 Thank you.