Images are fundamental in the day-to-day practice of dentistry. They serve as documentation of dental procedures and as forensic evidence. They play an essential role in dentist-patient-ceramist communication. This guide focuses on the best practices & methods of photography in the AACD accreditation context. These instructions will be helpful for all dental practitioners who want to produce technically superlative and memorable images, whether they are novices or experts in the realms of conventional and digital photography.

Before You Start Tips

1. Mark with a white marker 3 settings on your lens 1:10, 1:2, 1:1 respectively.
   By using a manual focus you will be able to preset the focal length of your lens to a desired magnification. This way you will always keep the same distance between the lens and the subject that will help with uniform ” before and after” exposures.

	Preparation		Painting		Finished

2. It is always better to underexpose in digital photography of dentition by half stop than overexpose it and then balance the global changes of the picture afterwards using levels, brightness/ contrast, and selective color balance in photo-shop.

	Histogram

 

3. When shooting a frontal views make sure that the flash reflections of the line angles are as close as possible to be “mirror reflections” of each other.

	Mirror Reflections

Photography Pg.2 »

Last Modified: June 30, 2008