Dental Photography Settings – Getting Started and Common Challenges – PDP164

Jaz’s Introduction:
So you can start to even buy your first kit. Like we talk about buying the camera kit, why each component is important, the different settings that me and Ray are using. So hopefully that will inspire and uplift you.

Hello Protruserati, I’m Jaz Gulati and welcome back to another episode of Protrusive Dental Podcast. I just want to say that photography is so important to my mental health. I actually mean it. The days where I don’t take any photos, or I don’t record any video content of my procedures. I don’t feel great. I honestly, if I go like a few days without taking a photo, it means that I haven’t been expressive, that I haven’t been challenging myself, that I haven’t been reflective and without all those things, then I’m not enjoying my dentistry.

So I find that the days I don’t take photos, I don’t enjoy as much and I take more photos, I’m really reflecting more. I’m perhaps doing something that interests me. I just find I’m much happier. So the key to my happiness and dentistry is rubber dam isolation and dental photography. Now on the topic of Rubber Dam Isolation, recently we had our webinar, Quick and Slick Rubber Damn, it was live, it’s now available as a replay for Protrusive Premium Subscribers, and one of the listeners, one of the avid Protruserati, Dr. [unclear] from Ghana, he asked for a like a Rubber Damn Bank.

He said yes, I suggested it and he’s like yes please, so I was like okay let’s do it. So essentially, some really good courses that I’ve been on, they’ve got like examples of procedures, for example Dr. Nekky Jamal’s Wisdom Tooth course, like. He has so many examples of different wisdom teeth that he removes.

So sometimes I just watch, okay, I’m taking a tooth out that’s similar to this one. Let me watch the video before I do the surgery, right? So in a similar vein, I have so many examples of rubber dam isolation, different teeth, different tricky scenarios, the coronoid process in the way, the clamp doesn’t fit or whatever, various different scenarios, different challenges when it comes to rubber dam isolation.

I’ve created the Rubber Dam Bank. So this is, as voted by you on our telegram group and on Facebook, an uncut version. So I asked you guys, do you want me to make it like polished and edited and you just see like a two minute highlight reel? Or do you want the entire three and a half, four minutes I spend moving my head and waiting for things, whatever.

The real-world account of Rubber Damn Isolation you guys voted for. You know what? I want to see the uncut. All the struggles, all the raw versions. So I’m going to upload them all. And so by the time this episode is published on Protrusive Premium, the premium clinical section, you’ll see a folder called Rubber Dam Bank.

I might even think of a better name by the time this goes out, but then all the examples of rubber dam are on their label by which teeth and what was interesting about it. So hope you guys find that useful.

Protrusive Dental Pearl
The Protrusive Dental Pearl I have for you is regarding my philosophy on money. Now, the reason I mention that is because one of my first paychecks that I got from work as a dentist, I pretty much blew maybe 70 percent of it on a camera setup.

So a DSLR camera setup. I bought it secondhand at the time and it’s still going strong. My wife uses it now. So the body, the ring flash, all important lens. I’d done my homework, I’d done my research, and I knew that I really wanted a camera. At the time I was living with my parents, I was able to do that because I didn’t have any rent to pay. So I’m very grateful for that.

Now, tying this back in with my philosophy on money is the following, any purchase I do, if the intended purpose for me is temporary or something that I’m not using every day, then I will either borrow it if I can, rent it if I can, or buy the cheapest thing going basically.

Because it’s not frequently used. Whereas if I’m using something every single day, then I’m going to buy the best I can afford. And that’s like a philosophy I just live by. Now, let me tell you where this screwed me up. For my 30th birthday, my wife would be embarrassed to say this. For my 30th birthday, some years ago, my wife got me an air fryer.

And it’s not a very fancy air fryer, it’s a very basic air fryer, right? And it was it’s a small one, I was a little bit gutted, like, I smiled, I said thank you, but it deep inside, she knows this, because I joke about it. deep inside, I was like, what? This is it? My 30th birthday, you get me, like, a small air fryer?

Anyway, I use the air fryer, like, all the time, right? I love my air fryer. So, for an air fryer, something which I intend to use every single day, I’m going to buy I should’ve bought a Ninja! Right? Well, she should have bought me a ninja, but we should have had a ninja. Whereas if it’s something I’m not using very often, then I’m totally cool to skimp out and cheap out on it.

So just a philosophy I’d share with you. Maybe you follow this, maybe you don’t. I’m happy to read your comments below in terms of how you manage your life. But when it comes to even dental things, right, if I’m going to be using something, if something’s important to me, like loops, I spend good money on loops, good money on dental photography, because I’m using it every single day.

So I just wanted to share that with you. Before we now join the main episode with Dr. Ray Panisa, all about photography, the challenges and all the settings, and I’ll catch you in the outro.

Main Episode:
Dr. Ray Panesar, welcome to the Protrusive Dental Podcast. Fellow Protruserati, how are you?

[Ray]
Hi Jaz, I’m good. Thank you very much. A big honor to be on this podcast. I’ve actually been following you for a long, long time. As many of your listeners have been since I was a dental student, actually. So it’s a real pleasure to be on the show.

[Jaz]
How many years have you been qualified now, Ray?

[Ray]
So I actually qualified 2020, class of COVID. So, which came with its own challenges, as I’m sure you can imagine. And many people had very many similar challenges.

[Jaz]
I didn’t know that, Ray, actually, because when I see your work on social media, your clinical skills look way above your years, firstly, so well done.

[Ray]
Thank you.

[Jaz]
And when you came to visit me in the clinic and we spent some time together, I was really impressed by you in general. So you are, yeah, years ahead of how many years you’ve qualified. And so part of your journey once you qualify is the importance of getting into dental photography, which we’re talking about today, we’ll share our settings, how you got started. And some people might be thinking, well, if you’re doing a podcast about dental photography, why didn’t I get someone like who does courses on dental photography?

And whilst there is a beauty in that we have that already in the podcast, I think there is a real magic and a real special thing you can gain from someone who’s literally just been through the struggles, right? Like, imagine, it’s a bit like when someone messages me saying Jaz, my nephew wants to go to dental school.

Can you help him with this personal statement and advice about getting dental school? Like, yeah, I’ve done it. Okay. But I’m so far away from the struggles that that person’s going through that I can’t really help. I’m really excited to speak to you about this topic because it’s still so fresh and raw and your photography is brilliant. So you’ve obviously accelerated through that. But just before we go deeper into that, just tell us a little about yourself.

[Ray]
Yeah, of course. So my name is Ray. I’m working as a general dentist in Birmingham. I qualified in 2020 from Newcastle University. I work in fully private practice now. Did my foundation training in Leamington Spa, where I’m from originally.

So just moved back home really just to help save a bit of rent too. And so worked in my foundation here in Leamington, which was great. I absolutely loved it. I’d probably say that’s where I spend most time developing those initial skills and confidence in dental photography. And yeah, so that’s basically a bit of a summary about me.

[Jaz]
Lovely. And going private three years or coming once four years on to your fourth year, how do you feel about that? Is that something that you always felt like you needed to do? Or did you perhaps get the right opportunity at the right time? Tell us about that.

[Ray]
Yeah, a bit of both really. So during my foundation year, I loved it. It was predominantly NHS of course. I think I probably barely did any private work actually, but I think the beauty of the foundation year is that it is what you make of it. And that’s the most important thing. I was very lucky that I had very kind of, very supportive FD trainers, very supportive mentors.

It fit my style of learning and kind of progression best because I’m very much, I like to get stuck in and find my own way and make my own mistakes. I know a lot of trainers are quite hands on and that didn’t really work with me, and my trainers were very, kind of, hands off, but were always there when I needed them.

That worked very well for me, so I could just crack on, make my own mistakes, and that’s why I learned best, really. So, that’s really where it all started.

[Jaz]
So getting into private Dentistry so soon, did you, were you nervous about it? And then, as you get into it now, how’s that been for you?

[Ray]
Yeah, I was really nervous, to be honest. That first year, I thought, okay, I definitely wanted to expand the kind of clinical work I could do and I could see in that system that there were quite a lot of restrictions and I couldn’t do everything I wanted to and I was lucky in the fact that I could just crack on and there’s many composite work, composite restorations that I could do posteriorly, which was not so much really expected of me.

I was expected to do a lot of amalgams and sort of get the UDAs in and that kind of the rigmarole of all that. But I actually really enjoyed that I could have the freedom to do what I wanted to and that’s really where it starts for me because I had the freedom to do what I wanted to.

I just did tons and tons of rubber down works, some posterior composite work, which is really the bread and butter, just cracking on with getting rid of decay carries and doing the basic, the fundamental work. So that helped me build my confidence initially. I think I was just lucky in where I was, it was quite high needs. So I had tons and tons of work coming in to get through all of that.

[Jaz]
You got your reps in basically, right? And I was going to just at that moment, I’m going to say, I’m going to raise my glass of water to your trainers, right? To your trainers, all right? Because that is exactly what you need, right? Someone to encourage a young dentist in New York school and not have to force them that, no, you must do amalgams. And to give you that freedom? Did you feel like you had diary freedom?

[Ray]
Absolute diary freedom, especially in the first sort of, let’s say six or seven months or so. Having said that, the first two months, I say it was quite affected by COVID because remember I just qualified summer of 2020. So the restrictions are quite still quite profound.

When I started, I got [unclear] and pretty much was just triaging for the first two months. I would say just a lot of phone calls and not much clinical work. I mean, I remember having my first extraction about. I think maybe three or four weeks in, and what was it, maybe a weekend or something, I can’t even remember, but I remember being terrified about it, and thinking, and I’ll never forget, my nurse was with me, and she sort of hand me the instruments and said what would crack on now, and I thought, well, is someone going to watch me?

Is someone not going to help me with this? Like, I’ll never forget this, because obviously in a dental school, you have a hundred different checks to go through before you actually put the forceps on the tooth or put a laxator on the tooth, and I remember in my head thinking, right, it’s an upper left 6 I need to take out. So in my head, I started saying upper left 6, upper left 6, as I started going towards the tooth.

And I found myself actually whispering it out loud, and I thought, oh god, like, this patient’s probably thinking, has he got any idea what he’s doing? So I was like, upper left 6, upper left 6, and got onto the tooth. Managed to get the tooth out, no fractures, which was great. So I’ll never forget that.

But yeah, clinical, very support trainers. A lot of clinical freedom could do what I wanted to. And yeah, I’d say the first six months is really, I could just crack on to do what I wanted to. But, so I knew I wanted to go down the private route long-term, ’cause I knew really in my mind, good quality clinical dentistry has to come with time.

And like you need good time to do things to the best of your abilities, taking the extra steps, taking extra care to do what you want to do and how you want to do it as gold standard as you possibly can get it to be. It just requires time. And for me, the NHS system wasn’t conducive to that good care that I wanted to carry out.

So, I use that year that very protected salary year to just do whatever I needed to do to get to build the foundational skills, get my speed up. And take the plunge into private and by no means that I feel like I was ready. I don’t think anyone could be that ready for it, but-

[Jaz]
I didn’t feel ready either.

[Ray]
You just have to take the plunge, I think. And that’s what it comes down to. I think, I was fortunate enough to be in that supportive environment where I built my confidence. I just sort of went for it. Really.

[Jaz]
I think the main lesson there for anyone listening is that you had a bit of luck, I think, right. By having the right trainers with the right mindset you know, you made your own luck. You actually took that opportunity that you had and you really went for it. So well done. And there might be someone listening who’s maybe 10, 12 years qualified thinking, man, I’ve been doing this kind of high volume dentistry for so long and I want to do nicer work and I want to do work, I want to spend an hour and a half on the procedure where I’m only getting like you from this is that, okay, maybe you missed your boat of that trainer year and having supportive trainers.

There’s nothing stopping you now from accepting a pay cut and looking longer for procedures and seeing less patients and to build your portfolio. And to do that, you need a camera. So that leads nicely onto a dental photography, which is such a huge fundamental part. Before we go there, actually, I just want to share one more story because you mentioned that thing about you muttering upper left six, upper left six.

I just, hilarious. But when my wife was in a similar situation, so my wife’s a dentist, she’s a very petite and I think we were in Singapore and she was taking out a tooth. And I came by ’cause I was waiting for her, was dinner time, was like 8:30 PM and she was doing a late clinic, and I was waiting in the waiting room, is she going to be done with extraction yet or not?

Anyway, she struggled, I said, struggled, struggled, struggled. Okay. And then she finally got it out. I was like, oh. And she goes to the patient, are you okay? And the patient says Yes. And the patient generally said to her, are you okay? The patient was really worried. Yeah. So that I’ll never forget that story as well.

But all these little things at the beginning, it can be traumatic for everyone involved, but I’m well done for getting through that period and well done for applying yourself. I think that’s what you’ve really done. So as part of applying yourself, as part of building a portfolio is taking photos. So how soon did you get a camera or get access to a camera? And how did you go about doing that? And I’ll show you my story after you go.

[Ray]
Sure. So I had a bit of an unconventional route into photography, I think. It actually didn’t even start off about dental photography at all. I mean, having joined societies like the British Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry when I was an undergraduate, that’s where I got advice from colleagues I looked up to and things.

They advised me, first things first, get loupes and a camera. That’s it, just forget everything else. Loupes, camera, forget about fancy courses and all of that for now. Just get those two things and crack on with that. And so, I knew I was going to do that and from day one, really. So, what I did was when I qualified, I invested in a camera and all the equipment in that summer after I qualified. And of course it was COVID year. We had plenty of time.

[Jaz]
Before, before you started, before your first paycheck.

[Ray]
Yeah. Oh yeah. Before. So I actually, luckily enough, I had a bit of money come in for my birthday that year was summer. So I kind of said, you know what, everyone, if you want to give me something, just please help me contribute to getting a camera.

That’s all I want to do really. So I thought I just saw the opportunity of a good two or three month period. Where we’ve got nothing to do, no responsibilities, Covid, the whole world’s locked down. Why not just use this time to hit the ground running, come September, get my camera, get the equipment, because as tech savvy as I think I am, I had no idea how to use an SLR camera, no clue about the settings, it was all unmindful for me, so I thought, let me use this time as wisely as I can.

So I got all the camera equipment and I just sort of started in that summer and actually, I thought, well, I used to have this as one of my old pastimes of doing origami as a kid. And I used to love it actually as a kid, used to love doing origami and I sort of just forgot about it over the years. And I thought-

[Jaz]
Ray, did you go to private school mate? Did you go to private school yet?

[Ray]
No, no, I didn’t, no.

[Jaz]
That was such a private school thing to do by the way.

[Ray]
Oh yeah, no, I didn’t. I was just a dork, to be honest. Yeah, yeah, I was just kidding. Yeah, so it was a thing I did as a kid, a lot actually. And so, I thought, let me use this summer. And I’ve got this camera. I enjoy doing origami. I’ve got all this time. Why not just sort of combine the two passions? Learn about a setting. Learn about the photography, the lighting. Aperture, shut to speed and all of that by doing something I love. And I’ve got time to kill.

So what I did was I spent the whole summer just doing these little micro nano origamis, literally about that big of different animals and objects and things. And I-

[Jaz]
Please, please send me a few, yeah, I’m going to, for those who are watching this, obviously people listening to Spotify and stuff, for those who are watching, I’ll just bring a few up on the screen. That’d be nice.

[Ray]
A hundred percent. Yeah. I actually made an Instagram page for that actually, which is a bit of fun. It was called crease marks. And I made that page just for some fun family and friends. And it also helped me really understand you like, focus on tiny objects good lighting and how to change things to get what I want.

So I thought that’s a good way to learn about settings. So, there was no courses. I don’t know what to do. I just thought I’ve got this time. I’ve got this passion. I’m going to see what happens really. So I did loads of-

[Jaz]
But how did you know what was the correct kit to buy for dental photography? How did you come to know that? And then what did you actually end up buying and where from?

[Ray]
Okay, so yeah, I got the advice from various colleagues that I could see on Instagram that had already been churning out loads of great photography, various dentists on Instagram. One particular that I have to give a shout out to is Dr. Céline Higton. So she churns out amazing work, phenomenal rubber dam work. And I remember seeing the stuff that she was putting out amongst many other great, great dentists. And I thought, you know what, let me just sort of ask her about her opinion, what she has, what she kind of uses.

So, I kind DMD her, asked her about her equipment and other people as well, colleagues that I went to university with. So I’m sure you know Ferdi Chum as well, does a great course himself on photography. So, people like that, who I consider great photographers.

I basically just ask them, what can I start off with? What’s a good baseline bit of equipment that I can use to then develop on, I don’t want anything too fancy. You just want to get the basics done right, and I went from there really. So from people I spoke to, they preferred Canon and I just thought, let me go with what I know works. So I got a Camera, a Canon body, camera body.

[Jaz]
Which one?

[Ray]
I got the Canon.

[Jaz]
Do you remember the name?

[Ray]
Yeah, EOS 250D.

[Jaz]
250, okay.

[Ray]
Yeah, 250D, because I kind of wanted a mid range one. It was a crop frame sensor, which we can come back to in a bit. So I got that one. It was, yeah, did the job. It was kind of a good all rounder, I thought.

[Jaz]
But did you get the brand new or used? Just give me a bit more details on where you got it from.

[Ray]
Yeah, so there’s a website called E Infinity. E Infinity, I think I’ve heard it in the UK, is the website. I can send you the link afterwards, but it’s a really good website. And everything is brand new. I think they’re actually coming from somewhere around Hong Kong area.

And I got, I can’t remember exactly where I got the link from, but I remember finding out about it. But I’ve checked out the link and it actually comes with the body and a baseline, 65mm lens, I think it was. So like a general all round.

[Jaz]
Which is not suitable for the dental photographs, but for use.

[Ray]
Exactly. So it came as a bundle and I thought, well, why not? If it comes included, I’ll get that. And it was a bit cheaper than buying it from, straight from Canon or a regular retailer. So I wouldn’t-

[Jaz]
Do you remember exactly how much for the body?

[Ray]
Ooh, testing me now. I think it was, I think both of them together, because I bought it as a bundle, I’m guessing around 350 to 400 pounds.

[Jaz]
This is for basically the body and the lens. The body and the lens came with it.

[Ray]
Exactly. Yeah.

[Jaz]
Okay. Yeah. Fine. So let’s just call that, yeah. Three fifty, four hundred. ’cause I’m trying to maybe build a picture of how much you should be spending for your first camera, you see?

[Ray]
Absolutely.

[Jaz]
Yeah. What about the ring flash then? And then the lens?

[Ray]
Yeah, the ring flash I got, actually it was called K&F concept, and it’s a really good third party ring flash. I didn’t go for a canon’s own one because it was like extortion it and it was 90 pounds. It was this absolute steal and you know what I have to say, it performed so well. I’ve still got it. And it blew my mind.

[Jaz]
I need a link. I need a link. I’m going to put this out for the Protruserati ’cause that sounds amazing.

[Ray]
Honestly, I can’t speak highly enough of it. And it-

[Jaz]
It’s not LED, is it?

[Ray]
I don’t think it’s LED. No, I’m not entirely certain exactly what the lights-

[Jaz]
It’s a proper flash, right? It’s little, tiny, little bald.

[Ray]
It’s not the little. Dots. No, no, it’s an actual, it’s actual flash. Yeah. Which honestly went wonders. It was as good as a photography, sorry, the camera that I used at dental school. And it was about, it looked about the same. So, and the picture’s coming out really well lit, good exposure.

And I was really happy with it. So I thought, no, I had to quit. Why not? So I used that, which is a great bargain. I thought, so use that first. And exactly right. That’s why I started off with a ring flash because it was kind of a very good all rounder. Does a job for both anteriors, posteriors. And yeah, it was a great way to start really simple.

[Jaz]
What about the lens?

[Ray]
The lens, I got the 100-millimeter macro lens, that Canon’s own one. And from speaking to other colleagues, I found out that, really the lens is the most important part of it all, really. You can get a body secondhand, no problem. And even the flash but the lenses really if you’re going to invest in something invest in a good lens, I was told so I got canon’s own lens, which I think I did get off the same website the e infinity website. So that came from there and it’s been great I mean, I know a lot of people advocate the use of 60-millimeter lenses, which is also fantastic.

They’re both macro lenses especially for small close-up objects and photography, but I went for the 100mm and yeah, I’ve been really happy with it ever since.

[Jaz]
Same here and I’ll talk about it, but I just want to know how much did you get your lens for?

[Ray]
The lens was definitely more pricey, so actually it was actually the same price as both the body and its stock lens combined, so it was about, I think it was about 450 pounds actually, 450 to 500, just over that.

[Jaz]
Brand new? That looks about reasonable, that’s pretty good for brand new.

[Ray]
It was brand new, yeah, exactly, so that was great.

[Jaz]
Okay, before I talk about my kit then and how I got it, did you want to add anything else to your first, the story behind your first camera?

[Ray]
Well, I kind of moved on from the, for the Ring Flash. So I used the Ring Flash for about the first two months when I started using it in my FD year. Then once I sort of felt more confident in that, I thought, you know what, I want to take this to the next level, if I can, because I’m sure you’re aware as well.

[Jaz]
That was quick.

[Ray]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Jaz]
That was very quick.

[Ray]
I just thought, well, this is kind of, I don’t know. It was very, I thought it was very lifeless photo as well, because you get this harsh light shining back from the teeth in photography, which is great, it does, it gets a job done, but I wanted to take my photography to the next level if I could, and as you can probably tell, I’m very much just throw yourself in, if it works, if it works, if it doesn’t, there’s ways to just work it out, I mean, there’s plenty of people, the great thing about this community that we’re in is that you can always get advice off someone or the other, you can always get an opinion or help with settings, so I thought, why not invest early and to start the ground, hit the ground running with it.

So, I get invested in a twin flash after that, which actually, once again, a third party one, and I can send you the link to that as well. It’s called the Mikey Twin Flash. So it’s similar to the other ones I don’t know. But once again, I just avoided the canon zone one because although it’s great and first party does a job well communicates with the body. I just thought maybe let’s get something a bit more budget friendly for this stage. And I’ve been really happy with that.

[Jaz]
Brilliant. Now, before we continue, like, would you say that for those listening and they’re buying their first camera? Should they perhaps maybe you say this, maybe they should just bypass during flash and go for a twin flash? Or do you think that they should start with the ring flash to give you an example. I’ve been on the ring flash 10 years. I bought the twin flash as well, by the way, the Canon one. It’s been the boot, my car for six months, maybe four months. Cause that’s when Sihaan was born. So it’s been the boot, my car for four months, basically.

But yeah, I’m going to, next week I’m going to do it. I’m going to set it up basically. But yeah, it took me all these years I’ve been using my ring flash basically, and yes, you’re right. There are some downsides with it, but in terms of consistency and a lot of the posterior work I do, it’s yeah, you can’t beat that basically. But what would you advise?

[Ray]
A hundred percent ring flash. You know what? You’re not going to go wrong with it. It’s a great starter in photography. If you want to just get confident and not worry about the kind of the more, I suppose, glamorous photography that you can see on Instagram.

If you want to just get it to build your portfolio and really for yourself. Ring flash is great. It works amazingly for anteriors and posterior work. It’s a lot less technique sensitive. Whereas Twinflash, as I said, it’s got, they both have their pros and cons. But, with the Twinflash, you just get much better, a sort of softer lighting, especially when you combine it with things like softboxes, diffusers and things.

But it is a lot more technique sensitive, and don’t get me wrong, I threw myself head in, and it was a bit of a nightmare to begin with, because especially posterior photography, it wasn’t very good. I had to really just practice and practice and practice to get my head around what to do with a twin flash and then and then you get to the stage where you can kind of combine it with things like brackets and things to kind of get the best of both worlds.

The good thing about a wireless twin flash setup is that you can modify it with things like brackets to actually get the same effect as a ring flash, but also have the versatility of a twin flash. When you combine it with things like brackets. So, for me, it was a no brainer.

[Jaz]
And I guess that helps you to get the consistency as well, the correct angles every time.

[Ray]
Absolutely, yeah.

[Jaz]
To get a consistent photo from one month to the next month on the same patient, right?

[Ray]
Absolutely, a hundred percent, yeah, exactly. Because it has the markings on it, so you can always refer back to that. Keep a mental note of it, but I would say, general advice would be I threw myself in maybe probably a bit too prematurely, but Ring Flash is a great all rounder.

Just start off with that, keep it simple, and just kind of build your confidence with that, for anyone listening and thinking about finding their first. Set up with a flash.

[Jaz]
Alright, well I’m going to share my story then. I got the, I’m holding it for those who are watching, for those who are listening, I’m holding, it’s now my wife’s camera as I hand me down to her.

It’s a Canon 60D . So why 60D? It’s because, just like you spoke to some people, there’s a dentist I really respect, I’m sure you know him, Richard Field?

[Ray]
Yes, yes, absolutely.

[Jaz]
And I know Richard, you’re listening because you’re a Protruserati. And I saw him post some amazing work and on Tubule someone asked him which camera and stuff. And he said he was using a 60D. So I was like, I’m going to do what Richard does. It was like nine years ago, 10 years ago. Okay. I bought myself a Canon 60D. Obviously my work in photography is nowhere near as good as his, but I felt like Richard when I had held the 60D in my hand. Right. So I got the 60D, but I got it used from.

And the top tip here. I got it from Gumtree at the time. I think it’s discontinued now, but you could probably still get a used one. And I got it for 250 pounds, cash on Gumtree. And the trick is you buy it from someone who is a photographer who’s just like upgraded their kit. So you know they’ve looked after it well, right?

And you can always usually bargain them down as well. So there was 250 for the body. And to be fair, it’s been 10 years and Sim uses them now and her photos are fine. They’re great. So if you were to get a 60D Canon body for like 80 quid from a garage sale kind of thing, go for it. There’s nothing wrong with the body, because I agree with you, Ray. The lens is the most important bit, like you said.

[Ray]
100%. The body is the least important, I would say, yeah.

[Jaz]
Agree. Now, one thing that I know Minesh Patel is quite hot on for the right reasons is that you want to have a kit that is really light to hold.

[Ray]
100%, yeah.

[Jaz]
Because I think the reason why my photos are good and are consistent and I don’t have an issue taking occlusal photos, and my occlusal photos are very good, is because I can hold my camera with one hand.

If I could not hold my camera with one hand, my photos would significantly have an issue. My occlusal photos would be pants, and therefore we’re going to start looking, comparing the grams of the complete setup as well. Basically, that or you got to do more bench press. So one of the two.

[Ray]
Exactly.

[Jaz]
So I got the ring flash, which is, no, I got the story. The lens. It’s all about lens now. Also of Gumtree used. But this is an interesting story here is, I was messaging the guy on Gumtree, and I don’t know why, he started emailing me and he thought I was a woman. And then like each email exchange got more and more flirtier from his side, I was doing none of it, right, from his side.

He was finishing with kisses and stuff and I’m like, bloody hell, what have I done here, right, because now this big hairy beardy bloke’s going to walk up and he might retract his offer.

[Ray]
Yeah, could have taken that to your advantage actually, could have tried to get him down even further.

[Jaz]
I got him down to about 250 for the lens, okay, and to meet him in like a halfway location, but then I couldn’t show up just by myself, so I took my sister, to pretend to be me, to take the lens, so it is a Canon 100 meter lens, and yeah, it’s still going strong, still amazing, and then the ring flash, I got also from like Gumtree, I remember meeting the woman at like King’s Cross station and randomly met her and stuff, so this was two months into my first year out of dental school, so DF year, and my first paycheck went towards it basically.

So that’s 60 percent of my first paycheck went to, I mean, I spent like 750, 800 pounds basing all the retractors and everything. That’s pretty good for something that’s still being used today.

[Ray]
Oh yeah, no, it’s a great investment. And like yourself, like with the accessories, I’m sure we’ll get onto it a bit. Like that is just a really crucial part of it all. And I’m a very big proponent of just invest in yourself, invest early on. I have a lot of colleagues asking me all about but I can’t get my principal to get me this equipment or that equipment or that material.

And I think you have to invest in yourself with this. Like, photography, composite work, rubber dam work, everything you want to do. You do have to have an element of let me invest in myself. Let me get the things I want to do because-

[Jaz]
It does have an ROI.

[Ray]
Massively.

[Jaz]
It does have a return on investment. When you invest yourself in your skills and your photography and your composite it does yield dividends.

[Ray]
Hugely, hugely. Exactly. And exactly a return on investment. And it’s just, it’s a no brainer, if you want to really excel in this career and this profession, I think you need to invest in yourself.

And I’ve taken that advice from various colleagues, mentors and people like yourself, everyone that I listen to have all told me the same thing, just invest in yourself, like just bite the bullet, make the investment and you’ll reap the rewards later on.

[Jaz]
So you had your camera set up. I had my camera set up at a similar time. You got there a little bit before me in your career. And how did you figure out which settings you were going to use?

[Ray]
Okay. Yeah. So once again, this is something that I got from various articles reading online. I know Canon actually, they’ve actually published their own document, on dents, specifically for dental photography. So that-

[Jaz]
No way!

[Ray]
Yeah, Canon, they actually have specific, I suppose, members of staff that they’ve actually set aside to work out the best settings for photography. And there’s a really good document, PDF I’ll send to you. And I was amazed.

[Jaz]
I’ll put it on the show notes.

[Ray]
Yeah. Cause I thought maybe Canon, why would they really bother with doing something so niche, but actually amazing that they’ve done this really good document to outline your kind of settings, the best sort of ISO, best shutter speed aperture for various different purposes.

And that helped me initially, actually from day one, I used that as a guideline. And then I kind of used that and I thought, I’m not going to go on any courses just yet. I just want to just really get a feel for the settings myself in my hands and it works. Find out what works for me.

And actually, once again, a bit of an unconventional story. I honestly used to do the weirdest things to try and work out how lighting photography works. Like, I would honestly come home from work and just I’d get my sister, because I’ve got some older sisters, and I’d get their make up mirrors, honestly, and because I didn’t have my own dental mirrors at the time, I’d use their make up mirrors, run them under some warm water, so that they don’t fog, get them to lie back and just take photos in their mouths, just with my camera, I would just use them, guinea pigs, left, right, and centre, I’d use and abuse everyone around me, just to try and practice and I do things like get pieces.

I could, I would see Manesh’s work on Instagram. I’m sure we’re all know he’s incredible what he does, and I saw these diffusers, these bounce cards that he uses and I thought let me just see what what effect this sort of white material does and how come I don’t have the diffusers on me. But I just got two pieces of white paper, slapped them around my twin flash and just saw what happened and I just experiment.

I mean the photos came out really dark and horrible but I could see what it was doing to the photos, to the smile I could see where the way he was going with all of this. And I just sort of stumbled my way through, I’m not going to lie, I’m by no means an expert in any of this, I just stumbled my way through it to find out what worked, and I would change settings, I would change the ISO, change the aperture, and see what would work. And it really is a case of trial and error, so I went with a baseline, so with aperture settings, so 1 to 20, so an f stop of 20.

[Jaz]
Before we go through, before we run through the settings, let’s go through each setting, what you use, what I use, and then why you use what you use, and then we can explain for the complete beginner what each thing means.

I think that’d be useful to do it in that order. But I just wanted to say, common thing, common theme, is that, oh, I started taking photos. But I wasn’t happy with the images and I was struggling and I gave up. So what I find is that the dentists who give up, they are losing interest too quickly and they’re not going through the necessary pain to evolve through it.

You need to go through that pain and frustration initially. There’s no shortcut for that. You need to have that experimentation phase and you said it trial and error. So you must be prepared for trial and error. You must be prepared to look at your camera and you think, what the hell is this? Right?

Meanwhile, Instagram, you’re seeing everyone’s amazing photos and you’re thinking, what on earth is this? But it’ll take you a thousand photos before you actually can see, Oh, actually this kind of looks like one on Instagram.

[Ray]
Yeah. Yeah. Well, exactly. And you hit the nail on the head there, Jaz. It’s a labor of love and it all stems from I suppose the mindset, right? You have that mindset of I will fail. I will-

[Jaz]
A growth mindset.

[Ray]
Yeah, exactly. Growth mindset and just throwing yourself in there and having that passion to kind of just go for it. And as you said yourself, there’s for every good Instagram photo, there are a thousand terrible, awkward, badly positioned photos that you just think, I hope these never see the light of day again.

And, yeah, but that’s what you learn from the most, right? As with everything and let’s say, bad root canal or bad denture you make, there’s always something to learn. It’s the same thing with dental photography. You’re going to learn so much from your failures and I’ve got plenty of them myself.

And I’ve posted myself on Instagram when I finished my foundation year. I posted just as a summary of the year, where I’d kind of grown from my really bad, awkward photos. Bad exposure, really dark and poorly lit to what, why I was producing at the end, or just a little bit better. And it’s a painful process, but you have to be prepared, like you, as you said, you have to allow yourself to fall, to stumble, to then pick yourself up and be like, oh, do you know what?

I’m actually getting the hang of this now. And it’s a great feeling when you finally get there, and you’re always improving, yeah, I still have days where I have bad photos, and silly thing is I’m forgetting to put the memory card and it all happens to us all, but you have to get used to it.

And you said yourself, people who are maybe listening and thinking, I’m getting sort of disheartened by it, we all get disheartened by that, but you have to just keep going, keep carrying on and you’ll get there. It really is important to just have that attitude.

[Jaz]
And going on for that, a lot of dentists, they feel that, oh, let me pick the, let me wait for the right case to start taking photos. Well, if you’re going to wait for the right case and then you can take a crappy photo on the right case, then you’ll never actually improve the trick. The trick is something as simple as making a vow to your nurse.

And so, you get some accountability and make sure the cameras out there and ready should not be something that you have to put together. What’s the opposite word? Okay, you shouldn’t have to assemble the bloody camera setup just before you’re about to take photos.

That is like the most boring two minutes of anyone’s lives, right? So the retractors, the mirror, everything should be ready to go. You just got to pick it up and shoot. Even the settings should be there already.

[Ray]
Exactly.

[Jaz]
Practice on every single, every single new patient, every single checkup, if you can as well. And then when the right case comes along, your photography will be much better. Now, Ray, just talk us through then your settings. So I want to know about, so for the settings for a three to one magnification ratio, so just a frontal smile shot. Okay. What are the settings that you’re using at the moment?

And then I’ll compared to mine. And then we’ll talk about what each, like, what does aperture mean? What does ISO mean? And then why you chose that setting.

[Ray]
Sure. Okay. Yeah. So for a three to one aspect ratio where you get a full smile view, so for a frontal or the kind of lateral smile views. I’ve got two different settings, so depending on what flash I’m using.

So, as I said, I’m still learning myself about how to manipulate the flash and adjust things correctly. But when I’m using a ring flash, I kind of keep it to the standard setting of f stop of 20. And then I use an ISO of 100. That never changes for me. The ISO just stays the same, ISO 100 to keep the noise to a minimum, which we’ll get onto in a bit.

And then my shutter speed stays at 1/200th of a second. So I keep that as it is, because of course, in photography and dentistry, things are not moving very fast, so you keep that. As a setting so those two pretty much are constant. The only thing I ever change is the aperture now when I started using my twin flash and combined it with soft boxes.

That’s what I had to change a little bit. So I kept all the the kind of the power settings for the flash the same because I don’t want to mess around with that too much. But what I noticed-

[Jaz]
With the flash itself, the power, is it, are you doing ETTL or are you doing like 1 over 1 or like 1 over 2?

[Ray]
I do either 1 over 1 or 1 over 2. I think more recently I’ve stuck to 1 over 2 just because it seems to work for me. I don’t want to change it.

[Jaz]
Even for the ring flash?

[Ray]
Even for the ring flash, yeah. Exactly, and it seemed to work fine.

[Jaz]
But then here’s the thing though, like I know what common sense is, but when you’re going to now zoom in to the teeth. You’re constantly having to change your flash, right?

[Ray] Yeah, well, I, what I do is actually change, I change the aperture in that, in that case, I change the aperture. So I’m getting closer in, I’m not too concerned about depth. So I just change the apture and it seems to work for me, actually. I know a lot of-

[Jaz]
Okay, good.

[Ray] A lot of dentists who for example, Manesh, again, I know he sort of advocates use of ETTL a lot of times and many other colleagues of mine do the same thing. Personally, I’ve been happy with using manual. All of my settings are manual. My lens, my actual settings, my camera body.

My flash, everything’s always manual. So I like to have that kind of full control over everything. And for me, it just works really well. So as I get closer, for closer up shots, I just change aperture and it seems to do the job for me reasonably well. So I kind of stick to that and I don’t want to mess around too much.

But when I’ve tried ETTL, I find that it kind of overexposes and it sort of just confuses my body a bit and I don’t really know how to fix it. So yeah.

[Jaz]
You’re a proper control freak.

[Ray]
Oh yeah, massively, yeah. I’m a creature of habit. If it works, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So it works for me. Yeah, I might be missing a trick. I might be able to improve on it, but for the time being, I’m happy with my setup at the moment, so yeah.

[Jaz]
I think, let’s talk advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage of doing it the way you’re doing it is that you have to be very good and slick at remembering, okay, what is the aperture I usually go to when I’m this zoomed in and when I’m this zoomed out.

You have to constantly tweak, you have to be a tinker man, you have to keep changing your settings. Whereas if you’re ETTL, you’re just changing the magnification and you just let the flash work out. So that’s what ETTL means.

[Ray]
Absolutely, yeah.

[Jaz]
ETTL looks and thinks, how much light do I need for the scenario? And we’ll just throw out the right amount of light. But where you win Ray, is when you’re doing whitening, for example, you’ve got someone who’s like a D4 or something, right? And you take it your half power flash, right? And then we come back six weeks later and then you take a photo again at half power flash and the lips, their skin, everything’s in the same color, but the teeth have whitened.

So you see a true photography whitening change. Whereas when you do an ETTL, because the teeth are now whiter, the program thinks, whoa, it’s too much white here. Let’s make the image really dark and it changes. And then now you’re not getting consistency. You’re seeing that the skin is lighter. The lip is lighter.

So you’re doubting actually if the whitening’s even work. So to get really consistent photographs when the color of the teeth have changed, your way is the superior way.

[Ray]
Yeah. No, definitely. You’re absolutely right. Consistency is the key for all dental photography. I mean, with magnification, with everything to do with this, consistency, consistency is the key word here. Exactly right there.

[Jaz]
And so I’ll just share my settings and we’ll talk about how they might differ from yours. And they’re very similar. So my aperture is one of it’s 22, f22. Okay, so you’re using 20, I’m using 22, very similar. My shutter speed is 1/125, yours is 1/200, so very, very similar. It sounds like a big difference, but in the photography world, that’s a hard game thing.

Yeah, I’m using ETTL, except now when I’m doing whitening and stuff, and I’m focused on consistency, I will go to about a quarter flash, which seems to, because after experimentation, I found that that’s what gives me the right image. If I put half flash for myself with my setup, then it overexposes my images.

So that’s where the trial-and-error needs to come in. So now that we covered our settings, do you want to go through what each thing actually means for the complete newbie?

[Ray]
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, I’ve also got a good diagram that I could send you that really summarizes beautifully which I just pull off Google images, really just to start off with aperture.

So there’s kind of three main settings. So aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. Okay, so, starting off with aperture. So, if you imagine, if you think of your lens almost like an eyeball, like a human eye, okay, so we get that sort of pupil closing and opening when you have various different light settings or ambient light around you.

So, when you do have a lot of light, of course, your pupil widens to allow more light in, so it’s very much akin to that. So, with aperture, it’s based on numbers, so it’s called the f stop. So if you see f1, f2, f3, so on, that basically is referring to the aperture of the camera setup. So when you have, it’s actually an interesting one because it’s a bit of a misnomer.

It’s the opposite of what you think it is. So when you have a higher number for the aperture, actually the hole in the camera lens tightens and gets smaller and smaller, allowing less light in. And when the f stop is lower, so let’s say f1, f2, it means that the lens is actually opening a lot wider to allow more light in.

So what happens is you get a much brighter image when you have a lower f stop number because the aperture is wider. But with this, you also get that more depth of field effect in your photo. So let’s say you have like a-

[Jaz]
I think it’s called bokeh. Is it called bokeh?

[Ray]
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The bokeh effect. Exactly. That’s right. So the bokeh effect basically is when you have different layers to an image. Let’s say you’re standing in front of a subject and there’s a mountain behind them and you have the person that say in focus, it’s all about the focus of an object. So that person will be in focus, but the mountain or whatever’s in the background will be a lot more blurry actually.

So, and if you have a higher F stop, so let’s say F 20, 25, 30, so on, the higher you go, the more in focus everything in the image will be. So it looked like it’s more of a flat image. So that’s really what aperture is, it’s basically about two things, how much light you’re allowing in physically into the camera body to capture the image, which means you get a brighter image, but also the depth of focus of the image.

If you want everything to be in focus, you go for a higher, generally a higher f stop value, so f20, F22, so on, for dental photography. I do want something to look more blurry.

[Jaz]
Which is why, like, if you’re taking, like, an occlusal photo, and you really want to see every single tooth, this is why we’re going for the F20, F22. I know some colleagues do F32, exactly. So, you want everything in focus, whereas if you want to get an arty farty focus shot on one aspect of a composite, or one aspect of a restoration posteriorly, and you want everything else, the tongue and everything blurry, you’d go for a lower F number.

[Ray]
Absolutely, yeah, exactly. So that’s kind of the more complicated one, I think. It’s just about remembering. That’s the one that, it’s opposite to what you think. So the higher the number, the less like-

[Jaz]
The reason for that though, for those who are into maths and did maths at GCSE’s and A level, is because actually it’s, F4 is 1 over 4.

[Ray]
Yes, that’s right, yeah.

[Jaz]
And 1 over 4 is 0. 25, is a much larger number than F20, which is 1 over 20, so 0.05. So if you’re mathematically minded, it’s not F4, F20. If you think about 1 over 4 and 1 over 20, then you realize actually you’re letting in less light because it’s actually smaller, that higher the F stop. So yeah, for some of those, some people that I hate numbers. And I never want to hear that again, but other people are like, oh, now it makes sense. So there we are.

[Ray]
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s right. So. So that’s aperture. And then when you come down to things like shutter speed, so shutter speed is exactly what it says on the tin, how the camera body works, so that it allows a certain amount of light onto the sensor inside the body to capture the image.

Okay. And it basically works like, like an eyeball again, blinking. Okay. So when you blink, it allows a certain light in and you can see what’s going on around you. It’s very similar to the camera body here. So with a shutter speed. Once again, it goes in terms of seconds. So you can have a longer shutter speed.

So, when the camera bodies, the sensor is open for multiple seconds. All the way down to absolute tiny fractions of a second. So what happens is, I suppose I can compare it to the sort of really arty farty images of people that they bonfire night, and they got those really nicely glow sticks and things, and you can kind of see almost like it’s tracing in the air, and they take those really nice photos of, various objects, the drawing in the air almost.

That’s when you have a very long shutter speed. So the shutter is taking a long, imagine like a garage door closing down. It’s taking a long time to close and that allows more of the light to come in and affect what’s on the sensor, what the sensor is receiving. So you can see that sort of long, dragged out effect of the glow stick or the firecracker or whatever it is.

[Jaz]
While the subject is still moving, right? So while the subject is still moving, it’s still capturing all that because it’s open.

[Ray]
Absolutely, yeah. And then you get down to the really fast-moving objects, okay? So let’s say you’re talking about, let’s say, yeah. Whereas classically you think of wildlife photography, so you think of a cheetah running, something like that.

It’s just going to look like a blur, okay? You’re going to get a very blurry photograph. So, the way you capture the running cheetah in that split second is you actually want to have a really fast shutter speed so that it captures that moment of when the cheetah’s running or jumping or whatever it is, okay?

So you have a really, really fast shutter speed and this is fractions of a second and as I said before, light aperture it’s, it’s denoted as one over a number of fractions of a second. So, let’s say one over two hundred is one two hundredths of a second. That’s how fast the shutter speed is at that moment, so it can capture something moving very fast.

So, really, it’s about the object, the thing that you’re trying to capture, how fast is it moving, ask yourself that, and think, if it’s moving very fast, I want a fast shutter speed to match that. And if it’s moving very slow, you don’t have to have as much of a, as quick a fast, a quick shutter speed for that. With dental photography-

[Jaz]
So then why, yeah, so I was going to say, why then for dental photography are we using something like more fit for a cheetah rather than the fireworks?

[Ray]
Exactly, exactly. Well, to be honest, with a cheetah, you’re probably looking a bit, a bit faster than one over 200, to be honest. But with dental photography, it’s kind of a balance. It’s a really, it’s a good balance between all of the various factors, the aperture, how much light’s coming in. The shutter speed and the ISO. It just gives the best all around image for that kind of speed 1 over 200, 1 over 125.

Both of them will do the same bit and unless you’re treating someone like, I don’t know, Usain Bolt, who’s running by you as you’re taking the photo, patient’s going to be pretty still, pretty, you know, to be honest, so all you need.

[Jaz]
But if you’ve got a shaky hand and you’re using anything lower, then that’s going to mess up your image. But if you have got a slightly shaky hand and you use the 1 over 200s that we’re using, it kind of compensates, doesn’t it?

[Ray]
It absolutely compensates for that, yeah. Because as you said yourself, you need a really light setup. I personally don’t have a very light setup at all. I’ve got quite a heavy setup, so I’m pretty much, exclusively a double handed photographer really, which I do want to work on and get a lighter setup, but at the moment I need that higher, faster shutter speed because yes, you’re right, when you’re holding your camera, you want to just take the image there and then and not have to have a blurry image.

It really helps to avoid the blurry images there with the shutter speed, okay? And the last thing in what we call the trial triangle of exposure, so to say. And exposure is just basically a fancy word of the final image, what it looks like really. And the ISO is the last piece of the puzzle really.

So ISO is really about the graininess and the what we call the noise of the photo, okay? So by noise I mean, for those of us, we’re old enough to remember. Do you remember the old Kodak style? This was the cameras and sometimes you take a photo on a night out or in dark lighting and you’d have this really old school cameras are just not great at all compared to what we have today.

And you get them developed and you see all these little dots that are forming on this, on the photograph? That’s what we call grain or noise. Okay. Cause it’s a very noisy photograph and not literally noisy, but visually very noisy. And that’s what the ISO is referring to though. Okay.

So the higher the number, the more grain and noise you’re going to get in the photo. Okay. So, and of course with dental photography, when we need things to be crystal clear, we want to avoid that as much as possible. And we’ve got plenty of light coming in. So you want, the reason you would use a higher ISO is because you maybe don’t have a good lighting conditions.

It’s in a darker lit room. So you increase the ISO to allow more light once again, light into the camera, but you’ve got plenty of light, you’ve got the surgery lights, you’ve got your flash, you don’t need high ISO at all, and in fact, you want to keep it as low as physically possible, and really for Canon, it’s an ISO of 100, which is probably one of the lowest settings you can get, you don’t need that much higher of an ISO, and you get a much less grainy photo, pretty much no noise in the photo, so that’s really what ISO is referring to. So those three things, ISO, your aperture, and your shutter speed.

Those three combined in that really careful balance. When worked in harmony, give you that well exposed photograph and that’s really what we’re all after. So, yeah, and you need to tweak all of these things to get that photo you’re after really.

[Jaz]
Make a mark on your photography. So just because Ray uses certain settings or I use certain settings or Richard Field uses certain settings or Minesh Patel, right?

Once you start off with someone’s settings. And then with your own kit, with your own unique ring flash that you have, the lens you have, the body that you have, feel free to experiment based on knowledge you have in terms of, okay, what will increasing the aperture do? What will increasing the ISO? Oh, actually, no, I probably shouldn’t touch the ISO because Ray said it’s to make a grainy image.

Let me actually increase the power of the flash, etc. Once you’ve experimented, you get an image that is very distinctly you. Like, I’m sure you see clinical images on Instagram from great dentists, but before you’ve read the name of who posted it, you know whose image it is because that’s their style of photography.

[Ray]
Absolutely right. You hit the nail on the head. Exactly like you said. I could just tell who he was posting that because of the way they turn up this kind of photo every time. And it looks amazing, it’s spot on every time and sometimes it has that almost dramatic effect or that diffused effect that is just so glamorous and lovely to look at on Instagram, that you just know who it’s from.

And exactly, you’re right, every camera, it’s almost like a fingerprint, to be honest, guys, it’s like everyone has their own settings, their own unique flash, and every room is going to be different, even ambient lighting, the incandescent light bulbs, all of that will all make A difference to your photography and it’s all part and parcel of a good photo and you will come up with your own style and just because, as I said, one person uses one set of settings and I use one, you don’t have to stick with that. We all use different things and that’s the beauty of it really.

[Jaz]
But whatever you do decide is a protocol. Write it down, laminate it, and then stick with that for the rest of your life. Because unless you change equipment, because you want to get consistent photographs. Now, I did ask Dr. Alessandro Devigus, who came on the podcast a while ago.

He owns Dentist.camera Instagram page. And just like you said, fingerprinting our photos. And he was like, no, no, no, don’t do that. I want one person’s photography in Rio de Janeiro to be the same as the person in Tokyo, because this is standardization of photography, and I get that as well. But there’s something beautiful about art.

There’s something beautiful about dental photography as an art and I think we need to be in touch with our artistic side as well. So do both. Make sure you’re good at consistency, but make sure your photos make you smile and you’re happy with them. I like the look of these photos.

[Ray]
Absolutely. Yeah. Cause you want to look back on it and think, you know what? That was a good session. I got what I needed out of it. And actually. I’ve learned something from this. And you’ll feel that satisfaction from your photography and it’s fantastic. Once you get into that, you get the bug, aren’t you? You get the bug and you think this is the best thing ever.

[Jaz]
You’re a bit like me, Ray, I bet, right? Let me pitch you the scenario. Imagine a day or a couple of days have gone by and you’ve just been so busy with your work that you didn’t take any photos. I know this day probably doesn’t happen very much, but when it does happen, don’t you feel you come home, and you didn’t enjoy your day? Like, a measure of how much I enjoyed my day is the more photos I took, the more enjoyable day I had. Do you find the same?

[Ray]
Absolutely the same, yeah. I mean it, it helps not only myself, it also makes it a bit more interesting for the nurses that I work with, it adds that extra kind of diversity to the day, it doesn’t make it as mundane, so to say, but yeah, it makes everyone’s day go a bit, by a bit better, I think.

It’s a bit more fun and you can have fun with your nurses, with your staff members, photography, in your lunch hour. Whenever anyone’s available, you can always practice then, and it makes it a bit more of a fun thing to do, you really miss it, honestly, as you said, when you’re not doing it for a while, you do miss it, and it adds that extra flair to the work that you do, it’s really amazing, and patients love it.

Honestly, patients go crazy for this kind of stuff. And when you bring out, a big setup for the first time, like I’ve got my camera set up right here with all my soft boxes and things. And I always keep it as you said, always ready to go at the side of the desk.

And when I bring it out and said, right, are you ready for your photo shoot? And they just, they love it. They feel, oh my God, this has never happened before. Like, this is great. And it adds that extra, uh, je ne sais quoi, I suppose, to the experience for the patient. So it’s great.

[Jaz]
Well, as we’re coming to the end of this podcast, as we wrap up, just tell us about, well, we could take a couple of directions.

We can talk about troubleshooting, but we can also talk about the right gear. Where do you want to take the final few minutes as you have the stage now, Ray? What’s the most impactful to help the dentists who are listening to this?

[Ray]
So I suppose it’s just about the motivation I think for me is the most important thing. As you said yourself, I find so many colleagues of mine, so many friends, and they find that they lose that interest so quickly. And I think a lot of people don’t understand the power and the reach of dental photography. So maybe spending a few minutes just talking about really what photography can do for you in your career, not only just, I think number one, portfolio.

We all know that for a fact, the portfolio is a really important thing to build your portfolio, to be able to apply for different jobs, different positions that suit your career. It is a picture paints a thousand words, right? But other things that people don’t even maybe consider, things like monitoring changes in patients.

So you can look back. So monitoring tooth surface loss. That’s a really big one. I use a lot. Things like referrals, of course, taking photographs of maybe lesions, sinus lesions that you don’t know, maybe what exactly what it is that helps a triage when you refer off and things like, even things that if you ever want to go for accreditation for, if you want to apply for prizes and things.

All of these things are reasons why photography is so important, and then you kind of look at things like education, if you want to go into, you maybe do a course, photography, photographing your work, it’s all part and parcel of it, there’s so many reasons to go ahead with that photography, so for anyone listening out there who is a bit concerned about starting, a bit shy, a bit worried about it.

There’s so many reasons, so many good reasons. You’re better off to do it than not to do it, basically. Just to kind of summarize with that. And then I suppose, just going back to, I suppose, things like accessories. Things that will help you take it to the next level. So, using things like your mirrors.

I’ve got a few things here. So, dental mirrors, quadrant mirrors. Things like contrastors, so black contrastors that you can use.

[Jaz]
So the black contrastor is this thing which when you see those lovely photos of anterior teeth and then they’ve got black background behind them. It’s just a contrastor, something you stick behind the teeth. Any tip that you have in getting the photos right with that?

[Ray]
So with this really, it’s just a case of getting your nurse to work really well with you. That is critical for me anyway, working with your nurse to get everything positioned correctly is perfect. So I usually, I get, if I’m taking like a close up of the anterior teeth.

I’ll get the patient to hold the actual physical retractors themselves and then get my nurse to hold the contrastor behind the upper teeth and really just getting them used to that position that you like. And once again, there is no kind of shortcut to this. It’s just about practicing that really.

What I like to do is hold it up against the occlusal kind of table. So instead of kind of letting it hover anywhere, just getting it right up against the teeth, it stabilizes the contrastor. And it makes sure that it’s unwoven and you don’t get bits of soft tissue, coming up in the photograph or dark shadows or anything.

It’s just about that consistent positioning. So that’s really important. Use your nurse, communicate with the patient and get a really good understanding of how you like things done and just practice, practice, practice really. That, yeah, that’s the best way to go about it.

[Jaz]
Just with the contraster, actually, if you’re using ETTL and you use a contraster, it’s going to give you a very overexposed image because the ETTL will think, whoa, there’s a lot of black in this photo. Let me shine as much light as I can and your teeth will look too bright, too white, not enough detail.

So again, when you use a manual flash mode like Ray does, that’s when you can take photos of the contrast and much better.

[Ray]
Absolutely. Yeah.

[Jaz]
Any other bits of equipment?

[Ray]
Bits of equipment. So in terms of your quadrant mirrors, you want at least two or three of them. Definitely get a few of them ready because things happen, they get scratched, they break, they get lost, all this kind of things happen.

So quadrant mirrors, occlusal mirrors for those really good occlusal shots, black contrast, essential, I think, for really good closeup work, especially when you’re referring up, or rather sending photos to the lab, and that’s something we didn’t cover as well. Lab communication is so critical and you discuss it very extensively your amazing Resin Blender Bridge course as well.

Communicating with photos is so good to the lab, so that will really help with that. There’s a really good retractor actually that I got from a website called, I think it’s called Dentiphoto. Honestly, I can’t speak highly enough of it because it’s one of those, it’s called C Retractor, I think it is, and it’s like an all-in-one package, where you basically, like, normally you have those two retractors that are separate, and the patient holds them?

With this one, actually, it’s all combined in one. It’s almost got like a loop, and it connects both sides of the retractors. So, you simply place it in, and, and that’s it. You’ve got two hands free, your nurse’s hands are free, and the patient’s hands are free as well. So, actually, it retracts everything really wonderfully well.

[Jaz]
Is it like an optogate?

[Ray]
Yeah, it’s essentially like an optogate. I think it’s personally; I prefer it over the Optragate because it has these little pull tabs on the left and right. So when you want to take a really good kind of view from the side all the way back to posterior molars, 6s and 7s, all the patient has to do is hold one side of the tab and pull to the side and it exposes everything wonderfully and they’ve got a hand free as well.

It just, it makes it so much more easy to work with. Optrigate is good, but when you’re going for the side angles, you don’t really get. It depending on the pace to retraction and how tight the lips are and soft tissues, but you don’t get as good of a retraction as I find these are. So that’s another really good tool to use. But yeah, so mirrors contrast there.

[Jaz]
And I didn’t know about that one. So I’m going to check those out. I’m going to buy a few.

[Ray]
I can send you a link to that.

[Jaz]
Yeah, I’ll check it out. Yeah. Send me a link and I’ll put all these on the show notes. Ray, we reached the end of our time, but man, I really enjoyed our chat and run.

I say about your journey. And you gave a lot of tips away and you broke down something we haven’t broken on the podcast for, which is the Aperture and the ISO and actually going back to basics with the settings. So, thanks so much. I encourage you guys to follow Ray on Instagram, see his work, follow his progress. Ray, what’s your Instagram handle?

[Ray]
Ah, yes. It’s just DrRayPanesar.

[Jaz]
Amazing. So check out Ray’s work and you’ll see what I mean about being a newly qualified dentist with a few years now under his belt and just the work he’s doing is way above that. So keep up the more power to you mate, keep it up.

And actually, just before you go, right, you held up your camera there. Just tell us about your current setup right now. Just give a shout out to whoever’s bracket you’re using, whichever software you’re using, where you got it from. Just complete the story of where to buy kit from.

[Ray]
Yeah, sure. So this is my camera right now. So sorry if anyone listening on Spotify, you can’t really see it, but you can see I’ve got my 100 millimeter macro lens just here. I’ve got my Mikey twin flash, which is the receiver just here, which sits on the hot shoe, which is basically that kind of plate that you can see on the top of your camera body.

And then these are the actual trans, the flashes here. So you’ve got one here and one here. Okay, and these are my-

[Jaz]
These are the Canon twin flash?

[Ray]
No, this is the Meike one, so I don’t know if you can see.

[Jaz]
Meike, yeah, yeah, you got the receiver there, you said Meike, didn’t you? It’s a German company, is it?

[Ray]
Yeah, it’s a German company, I believe, yeah. So Meike twin flash are really good, and it’s got the wireless speed lights that they call the actual flash pieces there, and it’s good because you don’t have to worry about wires all over the place and it’s actually mounted on an owl bracket. Okay, so that’s what this sort of bit of equipment here is and it kind of screws into the bottom of the-

[Jaz]
It’s a wing these wings that hold the flash and you can change the angles of them.

[Ray]
Absolutely yeah, so they’re really good because what you can do is sort of change the angles as you can see here you can change the angles of the the speed lights to get different effects of lighting and it’s just really versatile bit of equipment And as I said once again with this this is sort of my setup for anterior photography.

So I get my, these are called softboxes, these white boxes that sit over the speedlights, this white material here diffuses the light to make it a bit softer, and you don’t get that sort of harsh lighting effect you get with things like, with ring, naked ring flash, what we call.

[Jaz]
You sound like a chef, you sound like you’re just presenting me a dish, and I just get that vibe.

[Ray]
Grab one for tea, yeah, exactly, so that’s what you get with my setup here, really, and yeah, it’s good. What you could do, as I said before, what you can do-

[Jaz]
What brand of diffusers? I don’t think you covered that story?

[Ray]
Yeah, so the diffusers are called, they’re the Photo R Softboxes, and I got them from Amazon. Shout out again to Dr. Céline Higton. She’s the one who put me onto these, and they’re literally cheapest chips. I think they’re about a fiver or something on Amazon. And they’ve worked, they’ve been so good since my FD have used them. Actually, they’re a bit awkward to put on because they’re just, I mean, you kind of pay for what you get for it, they’re just sort of a little box.

But actually, Amazon is our friend as always, and I’ve got these little bits of Velcro, double sided Velcro. But actually stick on and that’s how I go about my daily photography. Just velcro. It’s all held together. Rubber bands, velcro and sticky tape. That’s everything really. So, people think you have to invest a lot in a lot of fancy gear and equipment.

You really don’t. It’s just, I mean, you can see it’s just a little plastic box, really, that sit over my speed light. So yeah, I can send you the link for those too. They’re great. And double-sided Velcro will save the day every day.

[Jaz]
Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. And guys, please, if you got this far and you’re not into dental photography, I’m hoping this episode has given you the impetus to go through those difficult days and those difficult photos to actually get through that tough bit and then discover your path to consistent photography and watch your career just go down a different trajectory. Think of any good dentist that you know, and respect and you know they’re taking photos because you’ve seen their photos.

Part of yourself discovery process and betterment is the art of taking photos and it just brings you so much more joy and fulfillment from your career. Ray, thanks for inspiring lots of people. I appreciate you coming on.

[Ray]
Thank you for having me, Jaz. Thank you.

Jaz’s Outro:
Well, there we have it, guys. Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. All the things that Ray recommended are in the show notes. So if you’re on the Protrusive app, if you scroll down, you will see it as well as the CPD questions so you can claim your CPD. And we’ve also made a little cheat sheet for premium subscribers where you can just download like a PDF, and you can laminate it kind of thing.

So that’s all there. And as ever, I really, really appreciate you listening all the way to the end. If you found this episode helpful and you’re one of the Protruserati that’s never left a review for the podcast. I’d really appreciate it. It really helps a podcast to grow so I can make more content.

Thank you so much and I’ll catch you same time, same place next week.