Photography question for KCSteve

[leschowe]

Hi Steve,
I just read your excellent photography tutorial. I have been having quite a
bit of trouble taking pictures of my engraving work due, mostly, to the shininess
of the metal. I think that your light tent idea is my solution, however looking
at the reviews for the various light tents on Amazon.com I find that many of the
reviewers are disappointed at the low power level and the poor quality of the lights
which are included with most of the models.

I have looked around and finally found the Lumiere Portable Photo Studio, which looks
very good to me but has no reviews. I was wondering what your opinion of it might
be. It is the only inexpensive light tent that I have found that actually publishes
the wattage (50W) and the type (Halogen) of the light bulbs which are included.

Below is a pointer to the "Lumiere L60235 Portable Photo Studio" on www.tigerdirect.com:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...p?EdpNo=3400035&sku=L222-1015&srkey=L222-1015

Thanks for your help,
Les Schowe

 

[monk]

GOODNESS GRACIOUS ! you can make one out of junk lying around your house for next to nothing.unless you have a psychological need to spend money, check the tip threads, the homemade ones are every bit as good as a store bought one.

 

[Powderhorn]

Leschowe;
You might want to check out the light tent that WalMart has in there photo section of the larger WalMarts. If I remember right they were going for about $39.00. It has a light tent, lights, and a tripod. It is a good starting point.
The other thing you could do, is to use smal PVC pipe, and some white sheet to make one.

 

[KCSteve]

Leschowe

Glad the tutorial could be of help! The Tiger Direct one looks like it's just a slightly fancier version of the one at Wal-Mart (two background cloths instead of one, both reversable).

As Monk said, you can scrounge up one around the house for next to nothing.

Since you're working with shiny things you pretty much need a full tent - the open cell of these little studios means you're only controlling reflections on 5 of the six 'sides' of the cube around the object and that will show. For a nice, inexpensive 'dome' you just need something whitish and translucent. Depending on the size of your object(s) and camera(s) a gallon milk jug works great - cut off the bottom and as much of the top as you need to get your lens through the hole. Set it on a light box if you want to 'float' the object or on a nice background if not (scrapbooking aisles at the craft stores have some neat papers for backgrounds). For light you can use some work lights from Home Depot - don't put them too close or you'll melt the milk jug but 1,000 watts will make it bright. Or you can use the ultimate light (which just happens to be free ) - go outside and use the sun!

If you have trouble with the wind (and sooner or later you will) some clear tape will hold the jug down so it doesn't blow away. Creative placement will let you 'hinge' it so you can easily arrange things.

Small dobs of modeling clay will hold your object the way you want it and can usually be hidden behind the object (from the camera's point of view).

The other problem you'll have shooting shiny (or just small) things is exposure. The camera's going to want to make the 'scene' a medium 'grey' (at least as far as exposure level). Select "center" (better) or "spot" (best) metering if you can - that way it will concentrate on the object instead of the background. Digital is your friend here because you can try things out without having to wait. You'll probably need to adjust your exposure and most likely you'll need to increase it - look for a way to tell your camera to add a stop or so of exposure (often a "+1" option under 'exposure'). Depending on the camera you may have to go to 'manual' mode to do this. Don't worry, it's easy! With the camera in automatic mode write down the settings it shows - say 40 / f2.8. Now go to Manual mode and set to 40 / f2.8 and you're right where the camera thinks you should be. There are actually a couple of adjustments we want to make here. The 'f2.8' means that the lens is wide open. That's good for getting light but bad for "depth of field" (DOF) - the amount that's in focus in front of and behind where you're actually focused. You probably want as much of that as possible so we need to make that f number bigger - which means we're making the aperature (what it measures) smaller which lets in less light. That's ok, we can increase the exposure time (decrease the shutter speed) to compensate. Shutter speeds double / halve for each 'stop' (roughly - 60 (really 1/60) goes to 125 rather than 120). fStops are based on the square root of 2 which sounds trickier than it is. It's easy to remember as a pair of sequences that alternate - 2, 4, 8, 16, and 1.4, 2.8, 5.6, 11 (that 'roughly' again). so the actual sequence is 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16.
Ok, so you're going to take that fstop from f2.8 to as high as it will go (f8 on the camera in my hands). That's 3 stops so we need to adjust the shutter speed by the same three stops to stay where we were on exposure. 40 -> 20 -> 10. Ok, so now we're at 1/10th of a second shutter speed and f/8. But that's what the camera thought was right to get a medium grey exposure. We want this thing bright and shiny so we need to add more light. We can do that by either decreasing the f stop (opening the lens up wider) or slowing down the shutter speed. We just worked to close down the aperature to get more DOF so obviously we need to slow the shutter down some more. Hitting another 'roughly' we go from 1/10 -> 1/6th of a second. Try a shot at these settings and see how it looks. You can adjust this stuff in the computer but the closer you are at the start, the better. You'll have to work from your numbers rather than mine, of course, but you'll be doing the same thing.

Oh, and yes you need to use a tripod for this (or some sort of support to hold the camera still). Using a remote control or the self timer is good too - keeps you from moving the camera when you press the shutter.

Let's see... oh, to see what the camera 'thinks' the settings should be just press the shutter button half-way down - that should make the camera focus and figure. Make sure you've got it set to show you the settings.

This photography stuff's not hard, just different. Thankfully these days we've got digital making 'testing' easier - at least with digital you can erase your mistakes (unlike engraving).