EF-S 60mm 2.8 macro USA

[tom_bunnell]

How about this lens mounted on a Canon 30D or a Rebel XTi for product shooting

at about two feet away and in a studio environment with lighting and tent and

tripod and remote shutter. All for web auctions (eBay) and resized and post

worked with Adobe Elements 4 or Corel Photo Album 6 and resized as the last

step.<div></div>

[jcuknz]

Gross overkill since the job can be done with a P&S quite adequately

[tom_bunnell]

Are you suggesting that all of the beautiful pictures on the Internet can be shot with a P&S camera or that pro or semi-pro cameras won't produce a better picture for the internet? Thats absurd.

[mark_chappell]

<I>Are you suggesting that all of the beautiful pictures on the Internet can be shot with a

P&S camera or that pro or semi-pro cameras won't produce a better picture for the

internet? Thats absurd.</i><P>

 

For most pictures used on the internet, no, it's not absurd. Unless you need to get into

the realm of very long telephotos, extreme low-light shots with fast lenses, or extreme

close-ups, the average P&S will do a fine job for internet work. Consider that a large

internet image would be maybe 1200 X 1000 pixels: barely over 1 megapixel. Nearly all

P&S cameras these days have several times that pixel count, as well as a substantial zoom

range; many also have stabilization and close-up capability.

[ben_kriete]

Given your described purpose, I don't think JC is wrong. The thing that will make the biggest difference in a product shot for the web is lighting. In terms of image quality, eBay's "super-sized" image guideline is 800 pixels on a side. Their normal image size is 400 pixels on the longest side. This is tiny, compared to the resolution of most modern cameras. You'd have to downsize the image coming out of my camera phone (I think it's 640x480) for their standard listing guidelines.

 

For your specific situation, I think any lens (short of a super-telephoto) would work fine. Unless you're advertising coins and stamps, you don't even really need a macro lens. An $80 Canon 50/1.8 stopped down to around f8 would work well. The light tent and tripod will be helpful to you in getting even lighting and using a low ISO (which help your colors look better). You might consider using a polarizer on your lens to help reduce reflections, but I'm not sure how well this will work on crinkly plastic that has reflections in different directions.

[bill_fouche]

To answer your specific question, the 60/2.8 on either camera will serve that purpose very well.

 

You could improve your sample image a lot by simply turning down the saturation and contrast. They are garishly overdone. If your monitor is not a good one and is not properly color-calibrated, you have little chance of achieving color fidelity. That is where the extra money should go. Also - if you are not already proficient with colorspace issues, be sure you are using SRGB colorspace throughout your processing for internet work.

[jcuknz]

What is the point of shooting at 10Mp when you are going to reduce the result down to less than one Mp for posting to the web. Last webshots I posted were around 0.030Mb and were shot on an 8Mp camera becuase it is what I have, but my first digicam at 320x280 pixels would have done it almost as well :-) The advantage of the more expensive camera is that it may have a sharper lens, although these days most lens are pretty good except in the bottle bottom lens class. But the extra quality of the expensive lens is only useful when making large prints instead of the large thumbnails usually used on the web. A top level photo group I belong to limits resolution to 800 across and 0.150Mb [150Kb :-)] without any complaints about loss of quality when viewed on 1024x768 screens.