Hooray! Lightroom 3 is finally released!

Oh, I am so excited, and all you dental photographers should be, too!  Adobe has finally released Photoshop Lightroom v.3, and I'm downloading it right now.  I can't wait to show you how wonderful this program is for us as dentists/photographers, because there are so many features here that you are going to LOVE, even if you're a real newbie to this game.  Now that we've successfully moved to our new Charlotte dental office, and we're getting things settled down a bit more, I finally have a little more time to do all the work for this site that I've been wanting to do. Since I'm adding a new orthodontic assistant full-time in July, it's time to develop some new and improved training materials so I can get my whole staff up-to-speed.....it's nice to have guinea pigs for something like this, you know?  LOL

Stay tuned!

Look for an upcoming interview!

Well, this was kind of fun!  Thanks to my friend, Dr. Lorne Lavine, and his blog The Digital Dentist, I was recently contacted by Kathy Kincade, the Editor-in-Chief of an online dental trade magazine, DrBicuspid.com, about doing an interview on why the Canon T2i DSLR will be such a great dental camera.  Not exactly sure when the article will be published, but I'll provide a link to it once it comes out.

Also, we just finished a full-mouth reconstruction case a couple weeks ago and saw the patient for a 2-week post-op checkup, and I'll show some different ways to showcase pictures like this for print and the web.  I'll use that to lead into my overdue post on how to manage/understand patient expectations in aesthetic cases by using digital photography, because how you showcase your other work can be both a powerful marketing tool and communications tool to understand just what it is your next patient wants.

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.