Steve Wylie wrote:
Good advice here. It's going to be very important, and very beneficial, to keep your white background consistent. Once you dial that in, whether by locking in your exposure, or by making Lightroom or ACR adjustments (as described above), note how you did it, so you can replicate it time and time again. Your parts will be consistently exposed regardless of what they are. The fact that you're photographing these parts on a white surface can really help you in terms of exposure as well as white balance. Look at the "info" panel in Photoshop to see that your luminance values on the white areas are just below 255 across the entire white surface, and that they match in R, G, and B values (whatever they are), and you'll be set....Show more →
Just to add on to this, to be clear, I'd lock the exposure & flash set up as well as the ACR/Lightroom set up throughout if you want easy consistency. The idea behind first picking the brightest hardware piece you plan to photograph is that once you have that piece done first, you know that you are extremely unlikely to blow the highlights for all the following pieces simply because they are darker, less reflective. So you are good to go, everything locked in. This process would be the optimal counterpart to doing an incident reading for studio strobes (might even be the same exposure when tested out).
You should read the info put out by cgardner here (his tutorials) and the Speedliters handbook by Syl Arenna and understand when to use manual flash and Ettl flash. Each has a purpose but it basic goes like this:
Flash to subject distance constant equals manual flash.
Flash to subject distance variable equals Ettl flash.
And there other rules for using the camera in manual or ev or av mode plus flash. Just like there times when to use AF or MF. So figure out the rules, learn to use the rules with consistent results then you can play with the rules to find what works for you in each setup or scenario .
