Today after finishing work I came home and took some photos of the games I bought, which I'm going to sell on eBay.
Before taking the photos I wanted to go through them, give the boxes a clean, and wipe the discs of any marks, or fingerprints. As well as give them all a once over, to make sure I'm not attempting to sell any severely damaged goods, unknowingly.
I didn't want to use anything on the boxes that could damage them, so I decided to just use water, and some kitchen roll.
Some boxes felt a bit grimy, while others didn't, but I figured it was better to give them all a once over to be sure.
Kind of nasty, but this one turned out to be the cleanest.
Hidden junk coats all things, and while it may initially look clean, the paper doesn't lie.
After cleaning the stack, I felt a bit grossed out, to be honest, and I didn't want to document the other bits of tissue paper.
As well as getting rid of junk, I peeled away any old stickers, and the glue residue that was left behind.
I cracked out my trusty Neewer LEDs which I've had for a while, they have faithfully served me on a few productions.
There are two LED lights, two stands, and two plugs, but the lights also take batteries, which I had to buy separately.
I bought the batteries from Thomann, who are a German-based company. Me and my dad have bought a lot of musical equipment from them, and they're always great. They also do camera equipment, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
I bought this white roll of paper too, to use as a backdrop.
I have a table mount for my camera which could have come in handy for this, as you can clamp backdrops and stuff to it, however, I brought that down to my partner's house so I could film some model-making down there when Kaleb is in creche.
I spend most of my time down there, only coming back home when I'm working, so it made sense to have some stuff that I can do when down in her place.
Armed with some trusty blu tack I was ready to stick the paper to the wall, and hope that it wouldn't leave any marks.
Here is my ramshackle studio. I had to lay some game boxes down to keep the paper flat... who knew rolling it up would make it harder to lay flat?
I wanted white light, so set the lumens to 5600, which gives nice cold lights, perfect for taking the sort of pictures I intend.
Here's how it turned out.
And here it is after cropping the sides.
It makes it look a bit more professional, and there are no distractions in the background.
I got into a rhythm with it, and it didn't take long to photograph the small stack.
I did most of the games in four photos. Front, Back, Box Open, Back of The Disc.
Included in some were close-up pictures of any imperfections.
Here's the box open picture.
It's an important shot to get because you want people to see the manual, or lack thereof, before purchasing.
Some people only look at the pictures, so it's better to show them what they're buying.
Here's a shot of the disc, and I actually found this the toughest, due to reflections.
This is kind of cool, and it's something I didn't know about.
My phone has an auto colour grade thing, and it really made the pictures pop and look more vibrant and aesthetically pleasing.
When looking at these, compared to the normal pictures, I instantly wanted to do all of the photos with the auto colour grade.
It just looks so much better.
This is the thing I always find when editing footage, and colour grading at the end.
Once you've graded some footage, instantly the rest of the unaltered footage looks crap, and it almost pushes me to get it all done, and that happened with these photos.
Until I saw the disc, and I think it actually makes it look a bit weird and in a way, I think I'm better off just using unaltered photos.
What do you think? Unaltered, or altered?
I'm afraid incase people think it's kind of false advertisement, or some kind of trickery to make the games look better.