Photography

My post titles are so descriptive and original…

So I bought a Photo Studio in a Bag from ThinkGeek a week ago in an attempt, as promised, to increase the quality of the photos that I’m posting (without spending a lot of money).

You can see the first attempt at this already in the Temple Guard 3 post. A few things to note:

• Having 2 lights does not absolve you of needing to have the 3rd light – oh, like, say the freaking sun – to make it look good. Taking photos at 11:30 at night isn’t a good plan.
• To try to solve this, I took the default setup of having the two lights diffuse through the mesh and just aimed them into the big hole of the white box directly at the model. The first photo was taken with them diffusing, the second with them aimed directly. I like the second better (still needs the sun or more light…).
• The tripod was next to useless. It’s too tall! The macro mode on my camera requires that the object be directly in front of the lens, not a foot away. In macro mode it would only focus as a blurry gray thing against a white background. In normal mode, once you got close enough using the zoom it would still be a blurry gray thing. So I had to bring the model closer to the entrance of the white box, and then hold the camera. Feels like it needs a pedestal or something.
• Curious cat is curious. Keep the cat out of the white box!
• The white box is folded up and kept in a black nylon case in a very clever manner. If you’ve worked with well-read computer programmers at all, you may know that clever is a euphemism for “we’ll never figure it out again”. It’s a 3 mesh panels with solid metal frames holding their shape. Those metal frames fold into a space about an eighth their normal size. I fold origami dinosaurs regularly, and this just continues to blow my mind.
• Something else that just occurred to me. I need a macro mode that also has aperture configuration. I was wondering why, in the sample photo, you can’t see the background. The reason is that when you set your aperture high, as you are supposed to for models, the background becomes blurry and the object you are focusing on becomes offset from the background. But since I have an Aperture Mode and a Macro Mode on my little point’n’shoot of awesomeness I don’t have the choice of both.

Thanks for reading!