Additional Sources for Digital Dental Photography Education

While my goal is, naturally, to provide practicing dentists with virtually everything they need to know to seamlessly integrate digital photography into their practices, there are obviously many colleagues who've done a great deal of work in this arena already.  Among those is certainly a dentist whom every dentist should know: Dr. Frank Spear.  Besides being a terrific teacher and phenomenal practicing dentist, he has put together a long series of DVDs on topics that cover about everything you could want to know in dentistry - including photography.

With that in mind, I'd like to HIGHLY recommend that you take a look at his website, www.SpearEducation.com.  Talk about one incredible resource!  He has a series of DVDs devoted to photography, and they provide practical tips and techniques on everything, including color management of your printer and monitor (extremely important for shade communication to laboratories in demanding cosmetic cases), case presentation, and more.

Check it out!

Keep It Simple, Right?

When it comes to taking pictures for dentistry, one of the most common questions I get is along the lines of, "How do I know which settings to use for the different kinds of pictures?"  Since most dentists, as well as their staff members, are not professional photographers, the DSLR cameras I recommend often seem big and really complicated.

Here's the truth: once you get the basic settings written down and memorized, there will only be ONE setting that you have to change on the camera body, which basically means that the big, complicated-looking, fancy camera you're holding will be turned into a POINT & SHOOT camera, and about everyone can deal with that. 

So what settings do you need to use?  Using the KISS Principle, here you go:

FULL FACE:

• ISO 200
  
• Shutter speed 1/200
• f-stop f/8.0

EVERYTHING ELSE:

• ISO 200
• Shutter speed 1/200
• f-stop f/25

 As you can see, the ONLY setting you really need to change of the 3 is the f/stop.  See, I told you it would be easy!

Soon I'll be giving a more detailed explanation of what those settings mean, as well as a few other settings to round out the complete list that you need to make dental photography truly simple.

4 Lens "Positions" for Dental Pictures with the Canon 100mm macro

In dentistry, there will typically be 4 "types" of pictures that you will take, regardless of the purposes for which you take them.  They are:

1. The Full Face/Portrait
2. Full Smile/Retracted Smile or Full Arch
   
3. Quadrant
4. Single-tooth (not very often except for endo)

When shooting each of these, I have found that there are certain "positions" of the Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens that approximate these consistently and easily.  Remember: DO NOT HAVE EITHER YOUR LENS OR CAMERA ON AUTO; BOTH SHOULD BE ON MANUAL AND MANUAL FOCUS.  To make it nice and easy, check out these pictures, then download the "Cheat Sheet" for use in your office.

For a FULL FACE/PORTRAIT, position the lens like this:




For a FULL/RETRACTED SMILE and FULL ARCH:



For a QUADRANT or 1:2 Picture:



For a SINGLE-TOOTH:



I'll soon have an equivalent set of pictures for the Canon 60mm f/2.8 macro lens, and eventually for Nikon and Sigma lenses.