Basic Settings

What Set­tings Do You Need?

When den­tists first pick up a DSLR for den­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, they are often intim­i­dated by the cam­era and ter­mi­nol­ogy, as they can be a bit con­fus­ing, and they worry that they will really have to under­stand pho­to­graphic fun­da­men­tals to take good pic­tures.  For­tu­nately, noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth, and with a few set­tings, the big, fancy-looking cam­era essen­tially becomes a big point-and-shoot cam­era that’s easy to use.

Man­ual or Automatic?

The first thing you MUST do for your peace of mind, is to make sure that BOTH the cam­era and the lens are set to MANUAL mode, not auto­matic.  On a Canon T2i with a 100mm macro lens, here are pho­tos to demon­strate.  For the top dial, the M should line up with the white line.  On the lens, that white line should be where the red one is to line up with the MF.

Why should they be on man­ual, not auto­matic?  Because of the focus: if you’re on auto­matic,  every time you press the trig­ger 1/2 way down, regard­less of how close or far you are from the patient, it will focus there, and every sin­gle one of your pic­tures will be of a dif­fer­ently sized area.  If every­thing is on man­ual, you can con­trol exactly how much of the patient’s smile, arch, etc you want to include, and they will be consistent.

Shut­ter Speed, Aper­ture (f-stop), and ISO

As I dis­cussed in my blog post from ’09 Keep It Sim­ple, Right?, the most impor­tant set­tings for tak­ing con­sis­tently good intra-oral and extra-oral pho­tos are easy and require only 1 change to switch from a full-face por­trait to what’s needed for a full smile, retracted smile, full arch, quad­rant, or even single-tooth pic­tures.  So please for­give me if I bla­tantly pla­gia­rize myself here :

WHITE BALANCE: IF you don’t know how to cre­ate a Cus­tom White Bal­ance, then I rec­om­mend your WB set­ting should always be on “Day­light”, as seen in this image.  How­ever, cre­at­ing a Cus­tom WB is most ideal.

FULL FACE:

• ISO 200
• Shut­ter speed 1/200
• f-stop f/8.0

EVERYTHING ELSE:

• ISO 200
• Shut­ter speed 1/200
• f-stop f/25

RAW, JPEG, or Both

In a post a long time ago, I rec­om­mended using JPEG files as the default for most den­tists, unless you are aim­ing for Accred­i­ta­tion or Fel­low­ship with an orga­ni­za­tion like the AACD, as they require you to use RAW images. That way, they know they are look­ing at unedited images with no pho­to­shop­ping of any kind.

How­ever, in the last few months, I’ve begun re-thinking this stance for den­tists in gen­eral — includ­ing myself.  Why? For the fol­low­ing reasons:

1. Big mem­ory cards, i.e. 8GB, 16GB, etc. are now very inexpensive
2. Big hard dri­ves, both inter­nal and exter­nal, are now very fast and inexpensive
3. Com­puter proces­sors are now very fast and can han­dle large files much more easily
4. Pho­tog­ra­phy soft­ware now mostly uses image pre­views, or the equiv­a­lent of thumb­nails, when you are view­ing large num­bers of pic­tures, instead of the full image, to avoid bog­ging down the com­puter, and
5. Most pho­tog­ra­phy soft­ware now allows easy view­ing of RAW files, just as with JPEGs.

So recently, I have decided to change my cam­era set­tings to shoot both RAW and JPEG files simul­ta­ne­ously.  That way, I have an orig­i­nal image for­ever with the max­i­mum pos­si­ble data cap­tured via the RAW file, and there is the JPEG, which is more eas­ily used for your staff if they are includ­ing them as insur­ance attach­ments, or if you want to import those into your choice of Prac­tice Man­age­ment Software.

Impor­tant Point: Use the SMALLEST RAW file size avail­able and either the Medium or Small JPEG.  As long as you have a RAW file from any cur­rent DSLR, it will be more than you need for a per­ma­nent record, and even that will likely be 5MB each, so if (for some rea­son) the Small JPEG file were inad­e­quate, you can cre­ate a TIFF, PSD, JPEG, or almost any other file for­mat from the RAW image.

(more com­ing soon)