How to take pictures of your PSP

PSP Fanboy reader, and well-known writer on the Internets, Dave Taylor writes in to ask us: "I'm wondering if any of you fanboy folk have any bright ideas about how to take decent quality screenshots of our favorite consumer electronics gizmo, the PSP? I've tried a bunch of different approaches with my Nikon digital SLR but none of them work worth beans." Fortunately for Dave, and for all of our wonderful readers, I just finished putting together a book on the PSP, and while working on that project, I spent many hours of trial and error to discover the best way to take decent quality screenshots of the PSP.

I'll try my best to cover the best ways to get a full shot of the PSP, as well as the best way to zero in on that gorgeous screen.

Read the rest after the jump...

Here's what worked for me:

1. A tripod—nothing ruins the shot more than an unsteady hand. A tripod ensures that the pic will be steady and in focus. I mounted my Nikon D70 on my tripod and set the shaft as high as it could go and pointed the camera straight down for most of my shots. This way I could get a straight on shot of the entire PSP or zoom in for a close up of just the screen.

2. Consistent lighting—generally the more light, the better, but it needs to be at a constant level from all directions to avoid odd shadows and glare off of the PSP's gorgeous shiny body. If you really wanted fully even light, you could get (or make) a macro light box. For my purposes, however, I simply shot in Manual mode with the flash turned off and had a nice bright lamp on nearby that provided consistent white light (I have an easel lamp that worked nicely for this). The only trick is that you have to position the light so that it illuminates the PSP nicely, but you have to be careful that from the camera's point of view that it isn't reflected on the PSP's face.

3. Manually set the white point—to get the colors right in your lighting set up, place the PSP on a white surface. I used a sketchbook as my background. If your camera has white balance settings, remove the PSP and use the white background to set the white balance.

4. Something to wipe the smudges off the PSP—the only thing that ruins a good, clean shot more than an unsteady hand is a nasty greasy thumb print.

5. Tinker with the exposure—if you're doing a zoomed in close-up shot of just the screen, then you're going to have to find a sweet spot exposure setting that grabs the light from the screen nicely without causing any distortion or blurriness from the action going on on the screen. This is going to vary depending upon what's going on on the screen so there is no hard and fast rule.

Give this a try and share your results in the comments. If you take some shots, or want to show us some cool all time high scores on your PSP, please share your PSP shots with us via our PSP Fanboy Flickr pool.