Cheap Mini Photo Portable Studio

I had several hours of free time during the Christmas holiday and I grabbed my camera and experimented on how to make a small item shot that looks decent, with a small/no budget. This exercise is pretty useful in real life if you are someone who put a lot of stuff on Ebay or online listing (ie. craigslist, etc).

The goal is to be portable, cheap, and quick - but also produces nicely lit object. I want a fairly soft light to create a nice even light. So, I am thinking either bounced light or diffused light. I went with diffused light, since it is easier to control the power that way.

So here are items that I used, which most if not all you can find in your house or buy cheaply:

• Parchment paper or wax paper. This is for the diffuser.
• Open cardboard box for creating a boxed controlled environment, cut out to attach the parchment paper (see setup shot for an example).
• A black or dark surface. Or glass/reflective surface will also work.
• A piece of blank white paper/carton to be a reflector.

I happen to have a black dining table that is a fairly smooth surface - so I used that as my surface. I put my box above the object, with another cut-out hole on the top of the box to let the light go through.

I setup my flash about 2-3 ft above the box facing down into the box. Attach the parchment paper on the cut-out hole to diffuse the light. Place the paper reflector inside the box on the other side of where the flash is.

Setup up the max sync speed on your camera and adjust your aperture to get a complete darkness exposure - this is for making sure that your only source light is your flash, not the dining room lamp, the sun, etc etc. Now turn on your flash and adjust the power of your flash to get a good exposure. Tweak the distance between your flash and the box as necessary, or add another layer of parchment paper if needed.

Here is my setup shot:

Learn How To Light via Strobist
Overpowering The Ambient

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Backlighting & Overpowering Ambient

The shot above was taken on a sunny day light in my living room - how did I do it? Check out the rest of the post.

First of all - I backlit the leaf
What does that mean? It means I use a light source (a Nikon SB-600 flash) and that light source is located behind the object (the leaf). This means that the object is sandwiched between me (and the camera) and the light source. Your light source could be anything: the sun, desk lamp, flash light, TV, etc. I just happen to use my Nikon flash - plus it provides a strong enough light to overpower the ambient light - which brings us to the second point.

Secondly - overpowering the ambient
What is "ambient light"? It is the light that is around you in your current condition. So in this case, my ambient light was sun-light coming through from some windows in my house as well as the kitchen light from my left.

What does "over-powering" the ambient mean? It means that I use an external light source (my Nikon flash) to be the primary light source and rendering the ambient light to be secondary light source or to be non-existent. In this case - I want the light coming out of my flash to be the ONLY light captured by my camera in lighting the leaf and I want the background to be dark (black or close to it). So my flash needs to be my primary light source and I need to render the ambient light into close to non-existent in the final picture - thus "overpowering the ambient".

OK then - how do you overpower the ambient? It is actually quite simple: I close down the exposure enough so that when I take a picture without flash it becomes dark/black. There are a lot of combinations you can use to accomplish this among shutter speed, aperture, and ISO setting. I picked ISO 100, 1/320 and f/11. I want to close down the aperture enough to capture the detail of the leaf and since I am handholding a 200mm lens, I want high enough shutter speed (more than 1/200s) . So that means low ISO, high speed, and closed down aperture - hence I selection.

After that, I position my flash behind the leaf, put it into High-FP mode (which enable the flash to work with shutter speed higher than normal sync-speed) and put it in 1/4 power and do a test fire. Adjust the position of the flash and adjust power to 1/2 and VOILA!

I did some post-processing with the image produced: cropping (I actually captured the whole leaf), sharpening (to strengthen the detail), and manipulate the color of the leaf a little bit (it was originally yellow/orange).

I use Nikon D80 camera, Nikkor AF-S 70-200 f/2.8 VR lens, and SB-600 flash.
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