I have a fashion apparel shopping site and need to take thousands of photos every season. If I had to contract that out to a professional photographer, it would bankrupt me. I have accepted the fact that I have to take my own photos.

Until now I have been taking them with flood lamps and a digital camera. Then I put the images on my desktop and edit them with Photoshop. What I would like to know is, is there a way to hook up a camera to my computer and view the image on my monitor before snapping the photo? Or, for my purpose, would I be better off with a video camera?

Don't use a video camera, your color quality will be dramatically effected. Higher end camera's with digital backs, mainly used for print production, will allow for an onscreen demo before you capture final image.

Lighting with floods is decent, but watch your yellows while color correcting.

yeah, i agree with you mikymunki, digital cameras are not recommended in taking web photos. But you camn still ask a web designer's opinion about that.

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[ Message was edited by: JimBot 12/12/2005 12:00 pm ]

"digital cameras are not recommended in taking web photos"
umm - I find a quality digital camera is fine for taking photos suitable for the web.

Experimentation for quality, lighting, colour is easily done with appropriate software.

The beauty of it all is in knowing that you got the shot that will work or if you need to shoot it again (straight away while you have the props out).

It's very inexpensive - it just takes time.

Stick with your digital camera and lighting setup - it's the best combo for web work.

Depending on your camera, you might be able to run a patch cord from the camera to a monitor - trouble is, at least with my Canon, this only works in playback mode.

Your best path is the one you are on - get good and set up an efficent workflow - from setting up shots, to processing images, to filing the final products for use - this is where you'll see imporvements - in the work-flow side of things.

That's something you can do easily with a webcam. I can't think of any instances of having seen a regular digital camera that can do something like this.

"digital cameras are not recommended in taking web photos"

Interesting opinion when you see things like this press release / article stating that 90% of professional photographers are expected to be switched to digital by 2010.

[link]

If your digital camera allows you to take a few dozen shots at a time before downloading to your computer, it is easy. Use a technique old photographers would rely upon for any serious work - Bracketing. This meant in the olden days of Film cameras, you take several shots of the same scene using different exposure settings so that you can use the best shot from that group.

Here, you can use many angles of the scene. Start with as high megapixel digital camera as you can. Take as many shots in various angles. Download them to your computer and you can mix and match with PhotoShop. Don't worry too much about color correction etc. You can set the final color settings in the post production stage with Photoshop.

For normal web use, even a VGA (640 by 480 pixels) camera is adequate. The more resolution you have in the original shot the more leeway you get in the post production stage.