Taken with your smartphone, not a camera
”" – Hello, I am a new patient who would like to make an appointment at your clinic. Would you please send me your Instagram page so I can look at your work?"
– I'm afraid we don't have Instagram!
– Okay, but on Facebook?
– We don't even have Facebook.
– Ummm… ok. I’ll call you back. Thank you! (phone disconnected) “
It's no secret that the rise of social media has changed social and professional dynamics, as well as human interaction, over the past two decades. With it has come a sense of validation that people and businesses were not accustomed to before.
The truth is, These days, success is portrayed online, and if your customers can't "verify your existence" through sites like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, they are very likely to pass over and look for another provider. And these are facts:
“361% of online bookings come through Instagram, 221% through Facebook, (BookedIn, 2019)”.
“41% of booking services are found through social media, 29% are direct, 25% through recommendation sites and 4.4% through organic search. (BookedIn, 2019)”
What does it mean to have a social media presence?
To simplify, it means having a website alongside an active and engaging presence on the most popular and relevant social media channels, such as Facebook, Instagram and/or TikTok.
We know what you're thinking! Keeping your viewers and potential new patients engaged and entertained in the dental business is no easy task. We couldn't agree more. The only way to engage them without having to spend a lot of time on the phone is to showcase what you do every day. That’s right – we’re talking about taking pictures of your work, arranging them in a harmonious design that aligns with your brand guidelines, and posting them on your social media profiles.
This now brings us to the main topic of this blog: how to take beautiful, scroll-stopping dental photos.
Looking into people's mouths isn't one of the most appreciated things anyone except dentists does. And since your main target audience should be your patients, we're here to walk you through the dos and don'ts and teach you a few tricks on how to take the best dental photos and put them together in an attractive "before and after" design.
How does photography work?
It is important to understandand why a photo will never show 100% reality. This is because What you see on your phone screen was captured and processed by your phone's camera (not you).
Your phone's camera sensors capture metadata (light signals). The signals are sent to your device's processors and converted into a RAW file (raw, unedited footage), which is then compressed and exported to a format of your device's choosing (most often JPG or PNG). When this happens, all of your camera's parameters (brightness, exposure, highlights, shadows, contrast, saturation, etc.) are adjusted to a level that can be displayed on your device in a pleasing way.
However: this means that, Since you are not the one who decides the parameters of the photo, the standard settings that your device’s engineers designed for everyday photos will be automatically applied to each of your photos. Because the environment (i.e. lighting, hues, colors) is different every time you take a photo, they always end up looking slightly different. This is less than ideal in clinical photography for teeth whitening, as this can lead to confusion and patients and viewers can tell that you either photoshopped the photos or that it’s not the same patient in the before and after photo.
To maintain as much consistency as possible across all photos, you will need tomanually adjust all the mentioned parameters (brightness, white balance, sharpness, exposure, highlights, shadows, contrast, saturation, etc, etc, etc). Some mobile phones have these options already integrated into the camera, but others do not (it is interesting to note that iPhones do not have them). In this case, you can use a ProCamera application, such as: ProCamera:
- Pro Camera by Moment
- ProCam 8
- ProCamera. Pro Camera for iPhone
- ProCam – Manual Control Camera (not the best, but it's free)
- Fiery
It's a small investment, but it's well worth it: you pay 6 – 10 pounds once and you have it for life.
This is why professional photographers always use RAW photos, because they want to have the freedom to decide what parameters the photos should be used in.
There are a few things you will need and need to keep in mind when taking clinical photographs:
- illumination (surgical light, additional light)
- Manual settings (white balance mainly)
- Angles, ratios and positions (hopefully we don't have to explain this😅)
- The focus object (teeth only, including lips, full mouths, lower face, entire face, etc.)
- External factors (nurse's hands, intraoral mirrors, retractors, shade guides)
enLIGHTENment
This is the key factor for a good image. Lighting needs to be consistent to always capture good photos. You should avoid taking photos of the same patient in different surgeries or in different locations.
If you decide to use additional lighting, you need to make sure it is not too strong (like a direct flash) as this will cause strangely bright photos and can also cause shadows, which will be difficult to remove. You can use something that will diffuse the light (the cheapest thing is a piece of baking paper taped over the light).
MANUAL SETTINGS
Based on what we talked about in the previous category, white balance is the most important setting you should look to get right.
White balance is a setting that adjusts the color balance of the light you are shooting in so that it appears a neutral white. It is used to counteract “warm” artificial lights with yellow tones or the cold light of a photo taken under a very blue sky.
Please notice how 3 photos taken one after the other, but with very different levels of white balance, can look drastically different.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE ARE EXAMPLES BASED ON THE LIGHTING IN OUR OFFICE, THE NUMBERS IN YOUR OFFICE WILL NOT BE THE SAME.
And here's a representation of the same concept in a video:
Since you want the difference between the before and after photos to be quite obvious in your teeth whitening photo, you need to make sure you are aiming for a neutral light to give your viewers the most accurate representation of the real shade.
To find out how to counteract the light of the operation, open the ProCamera app you downloaded, find the white balance setting, hold it up and move it (in camera mode, of course, as if you were about to take a photo of the operation) and see what the WB number (measured in degrees Kelvin '‘K‘') appears. Here are a few different charts I found online to help guide you as to what Kelvin degrees you should be aiming for. Once you have determined what type of light you have, every time you take a photo of the patient's mouth, make sure to adjust the settings to a neutral number and write this down in the patient's notes to ensure you use the exact same settings next time.
CONSISTENCY IS ESSENTIAL. Make sure your patient's skin color is the same in both photos. If not, edit them! Editing them at this stage is not cheating, quite the opposite.
ANGLES/RATIOS/POSITIONS AND FOCUS OBJECT
To take the cleanest before and after photos for social media, you need to Make sure the photos are taken from the same reference point each time. This reference point should be a straight horizontal line perpendicular to the patient's mouth. The line between the camera and the patients mouth should be at 0°, as shown in the image below.
Avoid taking photos from different angles, whether it's from below or above.
Avoid using photos that are off-center, symmetrical, taken from the side, too close, or blurry.
Instead, keep them clean. Centered, show your face if you have consent, otherwise try to capture your entire mouth in the photo.
EXTERNAL
There's not much to say here, except that those of us who work in the dental industry are used to not just looking at pictures of teeth all day, but looking into actual mouths. But that doesn't mean everyone has the same opinion. No one wants to see cheek retractors, intraoral mirrors, the nurse's hands holding retractors, or, worst of all – lip retraction! We do not deny the need for cheek and lip retractors in real clinical photographs, for recording or self-reflection purposes, but not for social media!
Keep the photos as clean and visually pleasing as possible, asking the patient only to display a wide, beautiful smile and that's it. In the very rare case where the patient has a very low upper lip line, then ask them for an exaggerated smile, but it is still better to stay away from retractors.
AND FINALLY!
To sum it all up, the easiest way to consistently do a good job with a phone camera is to follow these steps religiously:
- Choose a place in your office, which will be the location for the photo shoot. It should have good lighting, a simple background (neutral colors are considered - black, white, nude gray).
- Take photos with the same device every time, especially with the same patient.
- TURN the same lights every time, don't play with them too much.
- Use same settings manuals for white balance, as I showed you in this blog.
- Stay away from intraoral devices (cheek retractors, intraoral cameras or intraoral mirrors)
- Always check symmetry.
Source: enlightensmiles.com
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