caskwith wrote:Since we are talking about pipe photography what about f-stop settings? I have a lens which goes down to F32 which is lovely as I can get a whole pipes in focus at close range, but I lose detail due to diffraction.
(snip)
So what do others use?
PS CS6 - Smart Sharpen...
No, I kid...
Yeah, I don't think there's a good answer here. It's a trade off. Do you want a broader DOF, or do you want crisp details? Or do you want to buy a better lens? (Which will only help so much if any)
If you want to put a little more post work into it, you can do some focus stacking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking
Maybe you should shoot the basic profile, top and bottom angles at f32, then stop-up for closeups at other angles? I don't really know. Personally, I've found that my current lens (Nikon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S DX VR) is pretty acceptable down to about f14 for shooting pipes, but I'm also impatient and my white-trash lighting rig puts the exposure around 13s. Who wants to hold their breath that long???
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
(Nah, I've got a tripod...)
Before I stopped making pipes in 2006, I only had an average layman's knowledge of photography and was taking crappy pipe photos with an HP point & shoot. In the years after that, I became more and more involved in photography to the point where I actually knew what I was doing and had some decent gear
![Image](http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/26981_1224394057636_4489621_n.jpg)
But I have since sold my gear and strayed from the path of the photographer.
When I started making pipes again, all I had was a Canon PowerShot point & shoot. Now, as point & shoots go, it's a great camera with an above average lens, capable of manual settings. It's what I shot the two photos at the start of this thread with. I managed to pick up a used Nikon D60 with the afore mentioned kit lens for a song a few weeks ago, but the battery was charging when I wanted to shoot those photos.
Point being (OMG, finally!), I've been concentrating more on making pipes, and not so much on photographing them. Aside from the tip that started this thread, I've put very little thought into photographing pipes. I need to work on this... I need to get a good pipe photography workflow going on!
Sorry for building up to an anticlimactic ending.