High-key Small Products Photography

[abisurd]

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.

[Spinnerette]

those are awesome, I'd buy your lens in a heartbeat! : )

[abisurd]

Thanks Spinnerette for the lovely expression