What is your suggestion for an inexpensive lighting set up for indoor digital close up photography?

Answer 1

Depends on what you want to photograph. Check out soft boxes at http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=NavBar&A=search&Q=

Perhaps you are doing auction photography, so I'll post my stock answer for that topic. If your needs are more specific, then I'm sorry for giving you inappropriate information.

If you are not going to stick with the DSLR, almost any point and shoot with a macro mode will serve you well. The thing is, I feel that you need to use the flash to force the aperture to close while still having enough light for an exposure. Many here will tell you different, but follow this advice and see what you think.

Use your macro setting and experiment. Let's say you have a point and shoot camera with macro and a flash on the camera. You might have to go to a manual mode to do this, but...

Put your ring on a nice background surface. I like to just put it in a ring box. Zoom out at least half-way so that you will be working about a foot away from the ring. Be sure that you get focus confirmation. Shoot a picture USING flash. Check the LCD for the result. If you have overexposed the ring, use the EV adjustment to reduce the exposure. For small items, I often find that I need to reduce the exposure by about 1.0 EV. (That's -1.0 EV.) It is better to have the ring properly exposed and the background underexposed, so just worry about the ring for now. Using a deliberate underexposure will cure the "too shiny" appearance of the stones and metal.

If you know how, you can use either full manual exposure or just Aperture Priority and choose a smaller aperture (larger number) to make the ring show up in better focus.

If you have a DSLR, post your question again stating the kind of camera that you have and the lens that you are using and we will give more details.

If you are doing any image processing at all, such with Photoshop or it's cousins, you can crop the image to 800 pixels by 800 pixels and use Supersize images on eBay. I always use the Picture Pack when I am selling anything of any value.

Check out http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/heartring.jpg which I did a while ago using a Nikon Coolpix 5400 exactly as described above. I do NOT think this is acceptable, but we decided not to sell the ring anyhow, so I didn't bother to do a better job. It's still better than some I've seen. I don't keep old photos of sold items around, so I don't have much to show you, but at least you know that it's possible to get an acceptable result even without spending huge dollars on your equipment.

The key things to remember are:
-Macro setting
-Zoom out to get about a foot away from your subject
-Use flash
-Try different EV settings and expect that you will end up with a negative EV setting, such as -1.0 EV.

Here are a couple more auction photos done as described:

800 x 800 http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/yorkie01.jpg
800 x 800 http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/montblanc05.jpg

Answer 2

What I've done, during the day, is set up on a table next to a north facing window (in the northern hemisphere - use a south facing window in the southern hemisphere) without any direct sunlight hitting the subject. This gives a nice soft natural light, with somewhat minimal contrast and shadowing.

If a window facing away from the sun isn't available, use a mirror to shine sunlight on a white ceiling or wall which will in turn bounce diffused light back on the subject.

If natural sunlight isn't available at all, you can use the camera flash either covered with a cloth to cut down on the light (to prevent over exposure and harsh shadows), use a mirror to bounce the light off a nearby matte white surface that will send light back to the subject, or (if your camera has the capability) use an external flash with a tilt head or with the capacity to be remotely triggered.

Answer 3

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Answer 4

There are a bunch of methods discussed on this page of my website:
http://glassattic.com/polymer/photography.htm
(especially the categories on:
Natural Light Setups... Artificial Light Setups... General Info... and others)


HTH,

Diane B.