Am I there yet?

[skewzdust]

Actually not quite. Here's a mesquite baron I photographed with my new $8 light box set up:

My lighting consists of two 250W halogen worklights. I used my wife's Nikon D70 with 18-70 lens, high aperature (don't recall), and white balance set for incandescent. I love this camera. I still had to lighten with Paintshop Pro. I also missed the small scrap of debris, didn't notice until I was editing. Need to work on my backgrounds. I took this without a tripod, ours is at my daughter's house, long story. I had the light box set up on my table saw and proped my elbows on the table top. Not good enough, need the tripod...

 

[JimGo]

Tripod will help clean up that last little bit of blurriness, but otherwise that's a pretty good picture Steve! I know what you mean about the debris; seems I'm forever finding stuff in my pics after I've taken them. I usually try to manipulate the images to remove that kind of stuff.

 

[DWK5150]

Doesnt look to bad I think yeah have just a little blurr to it but you get your tripod you should be good to go.

 

[Dario]

Ditto with what they said. Nice pic of a nice pen. Good job!

 

[Daniel]

Steve,
You are defenitly in the parking lot. The best thing is you know what you want and have an idea how to get it. looks very good maybe a bit lower with the apature setting will help keep the whole pen in the focusing range. light looks real good. and as i tried to say before. knowing what you want out of your photo and the ability to think it out is the real gem. good looking pen by the way.

 

[gerryr]

That looks pretty good. A tripod is a necessity for this kind of thing. I would also recommend getting a gray card. I just bought new ones because I lost the ones I had years ago. The gray surface reflects 18% of the light hitting it and if you know about traditional black and white photography that is the mid point of the gray scale. I put the card inside my light tent with the lights on. I make sure the card completely fills the viewfinder, set the camera to automatic and depress the shutter release about half way. The camera displays the shutter speed and f-stop. I then switch to manual and set the shutter speed and f-stop according to what was displayed in auto mode. Remove the gray card and proceed photographing the pen. Since you're not wasting film, try a couple of pen photos with the gray card in part of the picture so you can see if you need to do some fine tuning.

 

[skewzdust]

Thanks for the info on the gray card, I'll have to try that. BTW your photos are awesome, hope I can get to your level.