Photo Progress

[Bill Walsh]

Picked up a pop up 24" x 24" photo tent at a local photo shop last night along with some 100Watt "Day Light" bulbs From Walmart (GE brand) and started taking photos this morning. Learned a lot about the manual settings, white balance, turning off the flash and resizing the photos to post them here. While at the photo shop I priced out some of their photo lights and for a pair I was looking at over $300.00.
I'm sure that lighting is much better to the trained eye but for what I'm doing $39.99 for the tent, $10.00 ea times 4 for the reflective light fixtures that hardware stores sell that have clamp on, 100 watt bulbs for $1.50 ea times four and two homemade light holders. The last batch of photos were shadow free and in focus. I still have a lot to learn but getting there with the help from folks here!!!!

[David G Baker]

Bill,
My lighting set up is the one that Bill Huber has on his on-line site and my lights are the daylight fluorescents along with the clamp on reflectors that you described. I am very happy with the results.

[Bill Huber]

Working with the White Balance is really easy if you have the software to use. I use Lightroom for all my images. I don't know what camera you are shooting with but if you can, shoot all the images in Raw format, this gives you the best control over the finial image.

When I am shooting in the light tent I will place a white sheet or patch in front of the object I am shooting, then take a shot, with the same settings on the camera (camera set to manual white balance) I remove the white sheet or patch and take another shot.

Then in the software there is what is called a white picker with it I can click on the white sheet or patch in the one image and that will then tell me what my white balance should be set to on the finial image.

For all my resizing and organizing I use a program call ACDSee, it is funny how we get stuck on a way of doing things. There are tons of different software packages out there that will do the same thing, these are just the one I use.

Here is the site David was talking about.
http://www.pbase.com/wlhuber/light_box_light_tent

[Bill Walsh]

The camera is a Canon SX230HS point and shoot. I don't think it has a Raw setting but it does have manual settings for the white balance. I'll check out Bill Huber's site. I'm going to try very hard not to get sucked into the photo sub-vortex, already in the turning vortex!!!!!!! Thanks for the advise.

[Bill Huber]

The camera is a Canon SX230HS point and shoot. I don't think it has a Raw setting but it does have manual settings for the white balance. I'll check out Bill Huber's site. I'm going to try very hard not to get sucked into the photo sub-vortex, already in the turning vortex!!!!!!! Thanks for the advise.

I just checked and that camera does not have a raw setting so you will have to use jpg. Thats ok, you can do great with that.
I would be using a tripod and the self timer.