I recently bought a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens. I needed some cash and so I thought of selling off my Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens that I did not use much anyways. But to sell it, I needed some good photographs of the same. I decided to bring out my DIY Lightbox and use my flashes to create the photos I needed.
DIY Lightbox
I had read this article on
$10 DIY Lightbox on Strobist.com long back. Only a few months ago, I obtained the right sized box and actually made this lightbox. It costs almost nothing to make and is great for such table-top studio-like product photography.
Lighting setup
A year ago, I had only recently bought my camera and then the Strobist bug bit me. I ended up buying 4 used Nikon flashes to be used in manual mode with my camera.
For this setup, I used two of them, one on each side of the lightbox. Both were set to the same power and same distance from the subject. One was triggered by poverty wizards (
Strobist: Lighting 101: PC Cords and Pocket Wizards towards the end of the article) and the other had its built-in optical slave turned on. Both were in manual mode at 1/8th power.
Here is the photo of the setup. Click to view the FlickR page.
Camera settings
Since the flashes are not in TTL mode, getting the exposure right is a bit of a guesswork. If you have some experience with it, you get the exposure right in two attempts. My camera was at f/11 @ 1/200 sec.
End result
Here are the results. They have been edited a bit in Photoshop Lightroom, slightly color corrected and cropped. Click the photos to view the FlickR pages (and more photos in the same set)
To end my story, I was able to sell off my lens for almost the same price I had bought it for. And the photos did contribute to the quick sale.