I realized that I haven't mentioned where my motivation to make a light tent stemmed from. This all comes from David Hobby over at strobist.com. He's probably not the first to do a made-at-home-do-it-yourself version of this but his explanation was very good, including the mechanics of actually making images.
This morning I made a quick stop at Home Depot to pick up some water softener salt and remembered that David had talked about using a single black granite tile in his light tent (which I believe he actually calls a macro studio) for low-key shots. I figured that the $5 investment would make for some fun.
I had a go at this with DD's high-tech Canon Powershot A520, a decent little point and shoot camera that Canon introduced about 6 years ago. I chose this because it has a nice mix of shiny surfaces, shapes, and lines.
46mm, 1/60th of a second, f/11, ISO 200, key light (Nikon SB-600) camera left in manual mode at 1/8th power, fill light (Nikon SB-800) camera right in manual mode at 1/16th power with a blue gel.
A couple of lessons learned on this shot:
- Make sure to clean the black granite tile well--nearly every piece of dust shows
- Try using gobos (go-betweens) to prevent light from directly lighting the black poster board background. I had to do a little work in Lightroom to get it as black as I had envisioned
- blue gelled fill lighting can make technology objects look particularly high-tech ;-) A gel is just a fancy name for a colored piece of cellophane that you put over your flash head to color the light (note the slight blue cast on the right side of the camera--not enough to distract, but enough to add some interest)
- A polarizing filter just seems to take away the reflection in the tile, it ddin't seem to affect the specular highlights all that much. The idea is to use the specular highlights to your advantage--here to make the silver parts almost glow and add some "sparkle" to a few other points (like the flash)
And for those with a curious disposition, here is the high-tech device used to control the light for this shot:
Total cost for this setup:
- Box--free
- Tissue paper for sides and top--had it on hand so it didn't cost anything additional
- Black poster board--approximately $1 at Michael's (craft store)
- Black granite tile--$5 at home depot
Total: $6 Not bad. I always assumed that those fancy, glossy photos in brochures required a lot of expensive equipment.
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