A picture is worth a thousand words! Digital photography improves patient communication, helps record baseline dental condition or illustrate tooth form and shade for your dental laboratory technician.

Getting started! Kit recommendations in November 2010

Cheek retractors – adult and child

Front surface mirrors

Canon EOS 1000D digital camera body – You can buy a body and a lens bundle together, the lens is okay for day-to-day photography but look at the alternatives which will be better quality although more expensive!

Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG – a macro lens, chose Cannon fit

Canon Macrolite Adapter 58C – this lens adapter enables your ring flash to attach to the front of your lens which has a 58mm filter size.

Canon MR 14EX ring flash – expensive but well worth it

Memory – this Canon camera uses SD/SDHC memory cards, 2GB will hold a lot of photographs but memory is cheap so consider larger capacities like 4,8,16 up to 32GB. If you plan to make movies with a camera like the Canon EOS 500D then get the largest memory card you can afford.

Accessories – a card reader will help you download your pictures to your PC or laptop to view and store the photographs. An external hard drive is a good investment to make a regular back up of your PC and laptop e.g. 500GB or 1TB! A photo-printer if you want to print your images.

Re-chargeable batteries – you will need them! Two sets of four AA batteries for your ring flash (alkaline, lithium, rechargeable Ni-Cd or Ni-MH), you can charge them and help save the planet.

A camera bag – to protect your kit.

A selection of clinical photographs – the images that you can take on this type of camera/ring flash set up are very high quality and a well looked after camera will provide years of service. My pictures below are taken on the lowest  image setting so I do not have excessively large image files which would otherwise quickly fill up my PC hard drive.