Photographing Movie Posters Can be Difficult
Photographing movie posters can be very tricky! Modern movie posters for example often have a glossy finish which means taking photos of them in normal lighting can be difficult. At Famous Movie Posters, we use a varied setup which depends on the poster being photographed in question. We list a bit more detail on our process in this blog.
We receive movie posters from a number of our contacts and these will have been stored in many different ways. Some of the posters we receive might have been stored rolled for decades and these can be persistently hard to photograph due to them wanting to roll back up!
Preparation Of The Posters
The first thing we will usually do when receiving rolled posters is to keep them flat in our storage area with significant weight applied to help flatten them. This process can take weeks before they are suitable to photograph and even then, some posters will persistently want to roll back up! In particular, some modern days posters are printed on much thicker paper which take extra time to flatten.
When we believe each poster is ready for photographing, we then place it on our metal board in our studio. Each poster is 'hung' up with magnets (which is the black dots you may see in some of our posters). The magnets are a great way to allow the photographing of posters without causing any damage at all. We have bene asked once or twice about whether we 'pin' our posters before photographing and we can confirm this is definitely not the case!
Even with several days or weeks of flattening, some posters will still have a slight roll in them at the ends. This creates particular issues with lighting as the light can sometimes bounce off these slight ripples and create a reflection. This becomes much more prominent when photographing most darker or black posters as they reflect more light. An example of this 'ripple' affect can be seen here on this poster of 'bats'.
Our System
We combat this by using several different methods. We first of these is that we use multiple studio quality lights that illuminate the poster from multiple directions. The idea of this is to light up the posters with diffused light to help eliminate shadows and allows us to control the angle of lighting. It also gives us a consistent temperature of light to help us manually adjust the colour balance on the camera. The colour balance is essential to give us natural lighting tones on the image and avoids incorrect tints ont he image. The lighting rig also helps illuminate the full poster from all four corners to give a much more defined and well lit image.
The second important component is of course the camera. We use a top of the range canon camera which shoots at 35 megapixels. This gives exceptional image detail to buyers when viewing the large images we provide on every product page. This allows every little detail to be checked by our buyers in superb clarity. It goes without saying that we always shoot with a tripod which allows us to ensure consistency with our photographing location (to ensure consistency of images) and also allows us to shoot at lower shutter speeds to enhance detail by improving the amount of light that can enter the camera.
A third part of our setup is the camera lens. We have tried several different lenses and we are now using an F1.4 51mm equivalent prime lens. The slightly narrower focal length allows us to be further away from the image when shooting, which helps mitigate any reflections. It still allows us to not fill the entire frame with the poster, which helps to avoid any negative consequences of vignetting which can be an issue when shooting at lower apertures. Vignetting is where the corners of the image appear darker than the centre.
The lens we use has also been carefully selected for this purpose due to its wide aperture. The F1.4 means it can allow much more light in than an equivalent lens of say F2. In fact, an F1.4 lens will let in twice as much light as an F2. This means that for the work we do, a wide aperture is incredibly important to give detailed images.
The Science Of Taking Images of Film Posters
However, a wide aperture is not everything as on most lenses, images shot at their widest aperture (F1.4 in our case) are usually softer and less sharp than pictures taken a couple of stops down. The widest aperture can also lead to vignetting which we mentioned earlier. This is why choosing a lens with a wide aperture is preferable as it means your starting base is lower. E.g. an F1.4 lens means you may end up shooting at F2 or F2.3 whilst on a F2.4 lens, you will probably end up shooting at F3 or F3.3 to get the perfect image. For example, if we look at the poster below, we can compare the affect that shooting at the widest aperture available to the lens Vs shooting a couple of stops down.
The below image was taken at the widest aperture of F1.4 and cropped in.
The below image was taken at an aperture of 2.5 and cropped in.
You can really see the difference in sharpness presented between the two. Each lens is very different but we usually shoot at a couple of stops down from wide open to give optimal clarity and sharpness throughout the entire image. Depending on your setup, this may therefore require a lower shutter speed to gather more light which is why the tripod is essential. You could instead use a higher ISO instead but we would always recommend a tripod.
We also have a couple of other tools that we use to ensure we take the perfect image. We use special levelling devices to make sure each image we take is the same as the last. We do this by using markings on our board to give us the perfect level each time for each image. We also use a range of filters over our lens depending on the poster. These filters help to eliminate any reflections from the lighting rig.
So there you have it! A definitive guide on how to take pictures of your posters! Don't forget to check out all of our movie posters on our site. If you have any questions on the best way of taking pictures of your collection then just drop us a message and we'll be sure to help. If you have bought from us and want a full, uncompressed image of the poster you have bought, then please send us a message and we can send you the full image file for your records.
