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how to: product lighting |
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My wife and I are big eBay fans. We buy and sell a fair amount of stuff. I buy and sell the bulk of my camera gear on eBay. I've found it to be safe and cost effective. On more than one occasion, I have sold lenses on eBay for more than I paid in the first place. One of the keys to eBay success is good product photos - in the case of lenses, this includes clear shots of the front glass with just enough reflection to demonstrate clarity, but not so much as to obscure the glass itself. The image on the left is of a lens I recently listed. To get the lighting I was looking for, I set up three flashes (an SB-800 at the top of a lightstand pointing directly down, and twin SB-600's pointed into reflectors on each side) and angled the front element of the lens so that it picked up the light in the reflector. The image on the right shows the setup. In the past, getting the correct exposure would take measurements, guide numbers, and mathematics. Not anymore! The Nikon iTTL system allows you to control all of the speedlights via menus in the camera - simply set up the light ratios you desire and fire away. The camera itself controls the exposure, including flash output, automatically. Even more impressive, this is all down wirelessly - with all the wireless hardware needed built directly into the flashes and D200 camera body. It is truly an amazing system. For this shot, I set the shutter speed and aperture manually, and simply asked the camera to pick the proper flash output. I set all flashes to group A, and set the camera to trigger group A with +1.0 EV to compensate for the high reflectance of the background. Essentially, this made all light ratios 1:1.
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| dan@lakeshoreclick.com | |