Dental Photography Tutorial

A thorough tutorial on how to take excellent quality dental photos. In this video, Dr. Mills shows you his techniques, cameras, equipment, the best angles to shoot, how to seat your patient and more.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Dr. Mills: Hi. I'm Dr. Brian Mills from Mountain View, California. Today, I want to be talking to you about taking the basic bioesthetic photographic series. I hope what I have to show you today is helpful.

First, I'd like to start off with what we use. I happen to use two different cameras. The first one is a Canon Rebel. It's a nice camera. I use this for the intraoral pictures. It has an intraoral lens and a ring flash. This particular setup can ... you can get it from Photomed.net.

The second camera I use is also a Canon Rebel. This one is set up for portraits. If you notice, I have a diffuser up on top here. The diffuser you can get from GaryFong.com. He also has a complete portrait kit for doing nice portrait photography. It's well worth getting. I think you'll appreciate having that in your office.

Also, we're going to be using retractors. There are basically two types. There are metal retractors, and we have plastic retractors. I prefer the plastic ones, but I've seen plenty of nice photography using metal retractors. Again, that's a personal choice.

Last, we have a little black background here. This is by Smileline.com. It's an excellent little tool if you want to just feature a particular area in the mouth. You'll be seeing that, too. I'll demonstrate that later.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Let's start with what not to do. First, you don't want your patient seated in a dental chair. Let me just go over why. When you're taking portrait shots, you won't be able to have the patient in a natural head posture. The headrest is going to interfere with how she positions her head and her neck and her back.

Secondly is that, when you're taking your facial shots, if I have Julia turn towards me so I can actually see her face straight on, you notice that completely changes the musculature here, here and over here, so we're not going to get a true representation of her head, neck and facial musculature.

Also, when we're doing the retracted photographs for the intraoral, I'm going to have to have her turn towards me again, and it is almost impossible not to skew your pictures somehow. I've never seen a straight picture taken from a dental chair with it not being skewed to the side. The first thing you want to do is have the patient get out of the dental chair.

Let's go ahead and start this way. Here we have our patient, Julia, seated. A couple of things that we want to notice is when you're seating your patient. These are going to be diagnostic photographs, so, first of all, the hair. We have to be careful that we have the hair off the ears, so we will be able to see in here.

We don't want sunglasses on or any kind of glasses. A lot of times, people just flip them up like that. You don't want to do that either because it will interfere with your diagnostic photographs and, also, if you'd want to feature any of these photographs in a presentation, it just looks bad.

Let's have Julia take the glasses off. The other thing, you don't want them to be hunching. You want them in a natural head posture. How do you do that? Some people have them stand. I prefer them seated. It's easier for me. You want them to just sit up nice and straight, and the eyes need to be level with the horizon.

Tip your chin up like you're looking up.

This you don't want to have as you can't really see the profile properly.

Now, tip your chin way in.

It changes also her facial profile. You want her head up and looking straight into the horizon.

Just take it off your ears, thank you, and on the other side also. Okay.

The other thing you'll notice is she has some small earrings, that's perfectly fine. If they're large earrings that have weight on them, they'll distort this part of the face when you're trying to take your pictures. So no earrings, no heavy jewelry, and no glasses.

Okay, so now we have Julia seated. We're going to be doing our portrait shots. Just a couple of things as an overview, you want a nice background. Okay? Another thing, when you're in the dental chair, you don't have a good background for your portraits. I happen to be using a black felt background that you can purchase at most camera stores. This is one of the parts that come with the portrait kit from GaryFong.com. You can also use a blue background. That actually gives a nice look also. It's a personal preference. Okay? So we'll be starting our portraits now.

The first series of shots we're just going to have Julia sit up nice and straight. When you're framing your shot, you don't want to have it too wide. You almost want to have it framed into your ... how your final cut is going to be. The first shot, we're just going to ask Julia ...

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