Lights, Flash, Indoor photos....OH MY!

System

Does anyone have a recommendation for a light to use when photographing items indoors with a light box? I am not a photographer and normally leave this stuff to the pros, however, I do need to photograph products I sell online and need help in the lighting area. I have been using a cheap 45 dollar light box with the lights that came with it. The indoor photos tend to come out dark or yellow and basically just suck.
I have to gather all my stuff and set up outside to get some natural light and sometimes those come out blue-ish but I can work with that.
So what do ya recommend for a light and where to purchase one? Just go down to say Wolf Camera or something?
I appreciate your time. Thanks

Jo

Zanotti

A lot of people here build easy light tents.

Here's one I did:

http://digitalgrin.com/showthread.php?t=51457

Simple, cheap and effective.


Z

ziggy53

If absolute color accuracy isn't that important, you can purchase "Daylight" compact fluorescent bulbs and mount those into cheap polished aluminum reflectors from a lumber yard or X-Mart store. Make sure to purchase bulbs with a CRI of 95 or better for best results.

Use those to illuminate the light tent and you should be pretty close to believable colors anyway.

(I don't recommend this approach for people and fleshtones and other pure colors like brass or gold etc.)

Here is an example:



Other than that, compact "speedlite" electronic flashes are better for color purity. You can use a matched pair on either side of the light tent and trigger them with optical slaves. You can use a small external flash on the camera to trigger the "main" flashes.

(You can also use an off-camera cord or even a PC cord and adapters, depending on your camera, but I really recommend the master-slave arrangement. The lack of cords really speeds things up.)

pathfinder

PhatStraps wrote:

Does anyone have a recommendation for a light to use when photographing items indoors with a light box? I am not a photographer and normally leave this stuff to the pros, however, I do need to photograph products I sell online and need help in the lighting area. I have been using a cheap 45 dollar light box with the lights that came with it. The indoor photos tend to come out dark or yellow and basically just suck.
I have to gather all my stuff and set up outside to get some natural light and sometimes those come out blue-ish but I can work with that.
So what do ya recommend for a light and where to purchase one? Just go down to say Wolf Camera or something?
I appreciate your time. Thanks

Jo

If the photos are too dark, then they are probably under exposed - How did you meter and expose these images? Can you post a few so we can see them?

If they are too yellow, I suspect you did not have you camera's white balance setting correct for the lamps you used. Did you shoot with a Tungsten setting or a Daylight setting? Using a daylight setting with tungsten lighting will cause your images to be way too yellow. A tungsten setting out of doors will give a very blue image.

You can use either tungsten lighting, daylight balanced compact fluorescent bulbs, or flash. Any should work if exposed and color balanced correctly. Learning to set a custom white balance for your camera will help get the correct color even better.

Zanotti's description of an easy to build light tent is great.

System

Ok.. I just use a little ol point and shoot Sony H5. I do know how to adjust the white balance and what not. I can start by tinkering with that, get some new lights as suggested and see how it goes. Here are a couple examples of really bad photos. The holiday one was taken inside and is too dull or yellow-ish. The blue one was taken outside and is way too blue. I do have better photos, I just wanted to choose a couple bad ones. Some photos I am very happy with but most of em I am not.

jogle

You have a custom white balance feature, now is the perfect time to use it

What you want to do is grab a piece of white paper (or even better, go to your camera shop and get a grey card for a few bucks), put it in the light tent where you want the object to be, and take a photo so the paper fills the frame.

Then go into the menu for set manual white balance, it will ask you to pick a photo... so pick the one you just took. Then set your white balance to the manual setting (not daylight, shade, etc) and it'll use the exact colour temperature in your light box. I'm sorry if these instructions are vague, every camera is a little different.

It's important to make sure that all the lights are the same exact brand of bulb and wattage. if you're outside other objects that reflect into lightbox can change the lighting too. Mixed lighting is hard to deal with as you basically have different colours coming from either side.

System

Thanks Jogle, that sounds like something I can try. I do know where to find the white balance so your instructions should help greatly. I am taking photos tomorrow so I'll play with all the suggestions here and hopefully have better photos. Gosh, I really appreciate everyones input and kindness.

Jo