Digital dental photography textbook

I have borrowed the book: "Mastering digital dental photography" by Wolfgange Bengel (2006) as it was one of the recommended books from the Szabi Hant dental photography course.  It is a fairly extensive book and covers in depth very technical aspects of photography and aspects relevant to dentistry. I will not be reading the whole book as it goes deep into certain topics such as how camera sensors work and camera recommendations that are fairly dated. However I will try to extract the more useful points form this text and summarise them on this blog. I find that after taking photographs for some years I can take fairly well exposed, reproducible photos but it would be good to have a theoretical basis behind what I do to understand why a photo doesn't turn out as well as it could and maybe learn a few things about how to make my photos even better.

The first chapter talks about why we take photographs in dentistry. Human beings are visually driven people and photographs have been used all throughout the history of medicine. Mainly these days, it is used for documentation to supplement treatment i.e showing processes and stages of treatment, legal documentation in cases of trauma and irreversible treatment. Communication, quality control, education and marketing are other reasons we take photos.

Demands on the dental photograph: This chapter talks about the difficulty of photography in dentistry. 

• The main problems is illumination as the objects of photography are hidden in the oral cavity. 
• Also, there are highly reflective areas of the mouth i.e teeth and wet tissues which can have different differences in brightness that can cause exposure issues. Standardisation is important with photography as it is used for documentation. Therefore framing, camera inclination, patient position and illumination should be reproducible. 
• As the objects are small, issues come with macro photography i.e high magnification ratio, shallow depth of field, perspective distortion, uneven illumination.

For a successful photo, the lighting, lens and camera need to allow:

• image sharpness
• sufficient depth of field
• Suitable reproduction ratios
• Correct exposure
• Correct illumination
• Colour correct rendition
• Distortion free images
• Sufficient working distance