Old Dog Photography

So I decided I should try my hand at macro photography.

This means, of course, I need a better / more even lighting setup than I currently have (the dining room table, with an overhead fixture & sunlight coming in the window). I bought myself a light tent — or, to use its commercial name, a Sunpak eBox studio. I now will subject you to a quick review of how well it works for me (so far).

Basically, the eBox consists of some fabric-covered square frames (each about 20″ on a side) that connect together with velcro, gray and white backdrop cloths (“sweeps”), and two halogen lights. Oh, and you also get a cheapy little tripod too — strong enough to hold a small point-and-shoot digital camera, but nothing heavy.

Assembled, the setup looks like this (note the two small lights on either end of the table):

The idea is that the two lights shine on the sides of the light tent, giving the enclosed subject even illumination for your photography. Unfortunately, I discovered that the two lights that come with the setup may be portable, but they’re not nearly bright (or even) enough to do the job well. At least, for the time being, they’re better than nothing.

So here’s my “before” picture (in the tent, with the gray “sweep,” and no lighting aside from the camera flash) of some little marbles I bought at the JPL gift shop showing the Earth, Moon, and Mars approximately to scale:

The reflections were not as bad as I’d expected, but everything has that washed out / deer-in-the-headlights look we’re all familiar with. So next, I turned on the lights and took a picture without the flash:

Overall, the image looks better (although the depth of field needs work) — but now each marble has two light reflections, rather than one. Not what I’d hoped for, but maybe I can improve on this. Anyway, I switched to the blue sweep, got rid of the marbles’ bases, and tried to move the lights to further reduce the lighting reflections:

Obviously, this is going to take some “tweaking” to render a very good image — the current lights are giving me light in far too concentrated a pattern. For grins, I took a picture from the outside looking in, too:

To make a long story short, the light from the halogen bulb isn’t either as bright or as diffuse as I’d like. My next step is shopping around on eBay for brighter / more diffused lighting for this setup.