# Am I there yet?



## skewzdust (Jan 24, 2006)

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...


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## JimGo (Jan 24, 2006)

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.


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## DWK5150 (Jan 24, 2006)

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.


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## Dario (Jan 24, 2006)

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


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## Daniel (Jan 25, 2006)

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.


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## gerryr (Jan 26, 2006)

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.


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## skewzdust (Jan 26, 2006)

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.


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