The lighting looks terrible. I have three 14w (60w equivalent) CFL bulbs behind white fabric to diffuse the light. Do I need to swap out for incandescent bulbs? These are the "bright white" CFL's that are between the "soft white" that have a soft sepia yellow hue to them and the "daylight" CFL's that have a bright glaring light that has a touch of blue in them. But these while to the eye in the box have only white, the camera is picking up a blue tinge that makes the pic look terrible. What lights should I change out to in order to get the best pics???
Do you have an image editing software like Photoshop or Irfanview? 99 percent of pictures you see are all edited to look perfect with some kind of software. Used to be done in a darkroom.
No. Besides the built in software for editing built into Photobucket, I have never dabbled in anything like Photoshop. The few people I have chatted with about this indicated that they just built the frame, draped a sheet over it, and lit it with a few lamps. They then used ordinary point and shoot digital cameras and uploaded them via Photobucket or Imageshack. I thought this was going to turn out much better than this.
That is an acrylic chopping board propped between two chairs, surrounded by poster board, and with one bare incandescent light - but the results were okay. If you don't want to edit in photo software, the big thing is getting the light exactly like you want it before taking the picture.
Available light is simple and beautiful if you look for it...
The thing with lighting a photograph (digital or film) that I have found is that I always had a difficult to impossible time trying to recreate what nature seems to do perfectly on it's own. I gave up artificial lighting years ago and now use only available light. For the images I posted so far on this forum, a window without direct sun and a white card reflector were all that was needed, that and a tripod to hold the camera and composition steady for the long exposures. I try to keep things simple, the fewer variables, the less there is to go wrong. Once that's done, I do use a slight color adjustment with a photo-editing application to warm or cool the image to the desired effect.
Some one let me on on a little secret. The simple plain jane non fancy Home Depot "Daylight" CFL's are the ticket. This was made with 60w bulbs on top and on both sides. He said to use 100w bulbs, but I already had these and wanted to try. I will be buying the 100w versions, but clearly this is the right direction:
And no, it doesn't need to be fancy... Some furring strips, some screws, some clamps, some fabric, and poof:
Light tents are more important on Stainless Steel weapons but even they can be photographed in natural light. Sometimes just adding a kick card is all you need.
From a semi professional photographers opinion, I would say the best way to get brighter better pictures from the box would be to use a flash instead of any type of incandescent or CLF bulbs. The pictures are not bad at all, but the shadows come off a little dark. I typically use 2 flashes, one at a 45 degree angle sort of behind the object I am shooting, and the other opposite the one in back.
The reason why I use and recommend flashes instead, adjustability. If I am shooting something that is darker, I can turn the power up while if I am shooting something lighter I can turn the power down as the lighter surfaces well "bounce" and "reflect" some of the light. To me its all about finding a setup that works on a wide variety of items that I could put in my light box.
Edit: another suggestion, get yourself a free demo of the software "Adobe Lightroom" they give you a free trial and it is a VERY simple program to use which will get your foot in the door with some basic photo editing with the possibility of more advanced editing. That will be a 30 Day free trial of the full version. After that one you can get a free trial of "Aperture" for another 30 days which is similar to Lightroom. SO there is 60 days to play around with 2 great pieces of software that are better in certain areas than photoshop and cheaper than CS5 (I use Lightroom, then photoshop to edit mine.)
And lastly, I noticed the pictures look a little blurry, are you putting the camera on a tripod? With light boxes like this 9 times out of 10 you will need a light box or a pretty good camera with a good lens for shooting in low light. Depending on the camera there are some cheap tripods out there as long as you are sitting right with the camera. IF you have a tripod and used it for these, see if your camera has a timer setting so you can get your hand off the camera and eliminate camera shake and blurry photographs.
-I don't claim to be an expert, I have just been doing this for 7+ years now and have learned a trick or to that I thought I would pass on. If you have any questions shoot me a PM.
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