the light box cometh

We now have a light box! thanks to my very kind, generous, gorgeous (can you spot the ego massaging going on here?) husband. I think he got fed up waiting for me to get on with the construction of it and decided to do it himself. Thanks Babe :-)

The making of it was pretty straightforward, following the instructions I've linked to in an earlier post. We managed to source all the materials from stuff we had kicking around the house (see, I knew my hoarding instincts would pay off in the end). The only thing we bought was a large sheet of white stiff paper to act as a sloping background to eliminate shadows. Unfortunately the paper wasn't stiff enough and so creased somewhat. But nevermind, that issue can be resolved at a later date.

Anyhoo, on to the testing out of the light box. My husband took photos using two different digital cameras with the light source in different positions, i.e. from the top, then coming in from either side. I've posted some sample shots below. As you can see, not all shadows were eliminated but the most interesting revelation was the difference in using 2 different cameras. My husband's camera [Panasonic DMC-FX12 with a Leica DC lens] produced very white, almost clinical shots showing lots of detail. Whereas my camera [Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6] came out with softer, sepia-toned images, giving a moodier feel. This was probably in some respect down to the exposure settings so will need to play around with that to get cleaner results. This could well explain why my earlier jewellery shots came out rather pink-tinged; I had put this down to a previous poorly designed lightbox and the use of a patterned background. I will re-shoot some jewellery in the new lightbox and experiment with the camera settings to see what, if any, improvements can be gained.

Another thing we are going to try is to make use of 2 light sources and try different lighting configurations, e.g. top and side or both sides etc. I think it will take a while to work out the optimum combination of lights, camera settings and angles.

Picture A using Konica Minolta camera:



Picture B using Panasonic camera:


photography copyright (c) Woodwose Carving 2009 http://www.woodwosecarving.blogspot.com