Photos coming out darker with a white backdrop when taken outside

Question

I am trying to take some photos of my product outside because the light seems to be better at picking up all the colors than when I've taken them inside but now when I'm taking the photos with the white backdrop they are coming out darker than when I had the backdrop painted lime green. I took the photos at 8am right when the sun had the  backdrop lite up the most I live in Florida for time zone questions. the other photos where taken at 9:30 and they came out a lot better but had a glare in them.should I go back and paint the backdrop green again or have any other ideas. PS I have adobe Photoshop elements 9. any idea on how to take out the glare in a photo when taken outside. and is their a website that can tell me when the best time is to take an outside photo in my region

Answer 1

cory moon wrote:
think you for all you help but one thing im still confused about is northern light. does that mean to have the item placed to the south west to have the sun to the north of the item?
Northern light means that the only light falling on the product is coming from the North sky (in other words, your product is in the shade of the house).  Specifically for your speargun products, your setup will be like this:
Get a medium gray background larger than your spearguns.  This is especially important if some of the guns are camouflaged.  If you can't find a cloth backdrop from a photo supply house, look in some fabric stores.  If not, then get a couple of 30in. x 40in. sheets of matte board from an artist's supply store.
Place the product and background in the shade of your house, waiting until the shadow of the house is long enough so that your camera will also be in the shade.  (A side benefit is that you'll be cool. )
Put your camera on a tripod.
Set the camera and tripod in the middle of the speargun, moving the camera back until the complete speargun is in the picture when using a "normal" focal length lens.  You can slightly decrease the focal length to the wide angle setting if necessary to get the whole speargun in the picture, but be aware that the more wide your lens is, the more the product will be distorted.
At that point, you should be good to go.  Let the camera use its automatic everything to take the picture and it should look good.  If you want, you can also experiment with a couple of shots using flash as a fill-in light, but that might cause some glare off parts of the speargun.
The photos will have two things happening that slightly complicate matters:
Northern light will be bluish because the light source is the blue sky. That blue cast will be over the entire image, so you can quickly and easily use PSE to remove the blue cast because you won't have to select anything -- just remove the cast from the entire image.
Depending on what you use to support the speargun on the background, you might get shadows, etc., and want to then separate the speargun into its own image with a transparent background.  Using a gray background will make that process easier because selecting the gun will be a snap.
Hope that's not too much info to absorb....
Ken
P.S.,  Depending on what the original colours are, you can easily use PSE to "pop" the colours before saving the images as PNGs for the Web.
Message was edited by: photodrawken to add a PS.