Digital Website Images

[Seth in Wisconsin]

Lighting

Would anyone care to share some tips for using the lighting cube? I have one now, but cannot seem to get the lighting quite right. What types of light fixtures and light bulbs work the best? What angles do you shine the lights from? Do you use the camera's flash? Etc., etc., etc.

Thank you (very much) in advance!

 

[mlou]

I prefer the halogen lights with lots of diffusion. (turn off your camera flash) Put your camera on a tri-pod or suitable support and move the lights until what you see in the view-finder has no shadows then click your pictures. Must people use two lights but some use three.

 

[mlou]

Try this site to see the different effects of your lighting...

http://www.gelighting.com/na/busine...sources/learn_about_light/pop_color_booth.htm

click on GE Cool White, incandescent halogen, high intensity mercury and so on...

 

[Eric S]

Its amazing what you can do with a little hard work. Practice makes perfect.

Yes the baby stroller and all!!!

 

[clay]

light preference

I prefer the halogen lights with lots of diffusion. (turn off your camera flash) Put your camera on a tri-pod or suitable support and move the lights until what you see in the view-finder has no shadows then click your pictures. Must people use two lights but some use three.

I have not tried halogen lights, but I have tried lights sent by two different "light cube" companies....one being a daylight photo correct Fluorescent and the other being tungsten bulb. I prefer the tungsten 10 times more....bulb is a Sylvania "PHOTO-ECT" 500W, 120V, 3200K, #9478.

What I have learned, using the right light sourse is only half getting good digital lighting in your images, the other half is the correct settings on your camera in manual mode. Some my be doing their pictures in auto mode, but I am following the guidelines of nearly all the photo professionals. I am still not 100% happy with what we have, but we are improving with the more we experiment with the settings.

One place to start with on getting all sorts of info on digital photography is http://www.shortcourses.com/studio/index.htm .

 

[RJD]

We used to use light stands like Eric, but when we remodeled the shop, we ended up with one end of our walk in close to the counter, so we hung our backing paper from the wall and use the cooler wall as a reflector. I just have Sulvania true spectrum (or whatever they're called) bulbs in the lights, and we take several shots with different zoning. A quick tweak in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop Elements, and the results are great. http://www.bloomery.com/detail.aspx?ID=641 and is one example.

 

[fairfield]

I know most use a white background, but what do you think of this lighting?

 

[12BucksFor2Dozon]

I have been pondering this exact thing....and have discussed it a very little with 2-3 people...

Thing is, we would have to (I or someone could) come up with a set of guidelines as far as quality (mega pixel count), size both in dimension as well as megs, standard format whether is .png or .jpeg, standard background (white?) among a few others like a watermark.

...

The timing of this is very good...my osFlowerCart is in need of images to ship with. Over the weekend I built a 3'x4' cube from my favorite building material, PVC (love those corner pieces!) and bought some $1/yard fabric from WallyMart.

Also, got lucky with my tripod...had bought a peice of crapola from WM and the @@@@ thing would not lock. I took it back to the photo center where a very nice guy told me it was junk, went upstairs to get an "out-of-stock" Vivitar tripod, and *gave* it to me for only $10!! I've been snapping shop pictures all day without a flash, and the photos look great.

As far as pics go, why limit the creativity of the photo artist? Anyone can convert photos to whatever format is needed using the batch command in Photoshop...