Help w/lighting a dark object on white background

[zen_mom]

I'm a newbie, and an amateur. My skills are limited to point and click and I tend to take many pictures, hoping for that one good shot. I have some Photoshop skills which get me through, but I'd like to learn to take better pictures so they don't need to be fixed up.

Here's an example of what I encountered recently. An older, retired friend asked if I would help sell some items of his on eBay - not too hard, right? First I just took some pictures on a white tiled floor with overhead fluorescents, but they were horrible. Then I used some corrugated plastic sheets that I have for Girl Scout cookie selling signs (yes, it's that time of year). I made a 4' x 4' box with these sheets and some white muslin material. I had 3 clip-on work lights with 75 watt full spectrum bulbs.

My camera is a Canon EOS Rebel XT with an EFS 18-55mm lens – pretty basic. I’ve tried several things, from the AF settings to MF settings and just kept changing options – not really knowing what I’m doing.

In addition to figuring out the right settings, I assume I need to do something with the lighting. You can see the white isn’t white and the details and color aren’t accurate. This is a favor and I’d like not to go out of pocket very much, but I’d love some advice. Anything constructive would help. Thanks in advance.

[Nicole]

First things first, look up how to set your white balance on your camera. Adjust this before you shoot and you will fix up the yellow background a bit. If you shoot in RAW you will also have an easier time fine tuning any colour issues.

Second, when shooting for a white background you will almost always need to light the background and the subject separately. It takes a lot of light to make a white background white and because of this you tend to need to put that light directly on the background. Because of that, you'll often need another light to light the subject. One trick I've used is to put a sheet of white computer paper behind the object then shine the light behind the paper essentially backlighting it. That means I need to put a light in front too.

You may be able to get away with just lighting the background if you use a tripod and longer exposure, but that's something that will depend on the lighting around you. For example, these were taken using the sun shining directly on the white background on a bright day, but I still needed a 1+ second exposure if I remember right (for some reason my EXIF is missing):



Now, another option is to make the background white in something like Photoshop, but that may be more work even than lighting the object.

[sk66]

I see two things..WB is off, try tungsten setting.
Shot is underexposed quite a bit. Try spot metering the statue.

This is simply an exposure adjustment in PS to fix WB and exposure.