Somewhat lamely, this is the only slide I had in about lighting. I left it up while I talked about the most important points, which are: Don’t use a flash unless you absolutely have to. If you can swing it, the common convention is to have specimens illuminated from the upper left.* If you have the time, it’s not a bad idea to bracket your Goldilocks shot with brighter and darker photos, by fiddling with your camera settings.

That link in the first slide will take you here, and the rest of the series is here.

Recently I had the opportunity to give a talk on photographing specimens and preparing illustrations in Jim Parham‘s phylogenetics course at Cal State Fullerton. Jim is having each student (1) write a description of a specimen, (2) run a phylogenetic analysis, and (3) do some kind of calibration on their tree. I think that’s rad.

Here are two photos of what I infer to be C8 of OMNH 53062, the holotype of Sauroposeidon . The top one was taken by Mike during our visit to the OMNH in 2007. If you’re a regular you may recognize it from several older posts: 1, 2, 3. The bottom one was taken by Mike Callaghan, the former museum photographer at the OMNH, sometime in 1999 or 2000.