I’ve been experimenting a bit more with the light tent that I made a couple weeks ago. The past two nights I’ve tried to take pictures of these pillows that Kate made (which she obviously got better pictures of in the daylight). I’m flat out embarrassed by the pictures of the pillows in the tent, so you’re not going to see any of those. I think they might be too big for the space I’ve got to work with. So after much frustration with quilted items and vintage toys, I picked a new subject.
I lowered the shutter speed to 1/13 and that seemed to help a bit, although I might need to go even slower. I’m frustrated with the “grayness” of this picture. If I touch it up much more in Photoshop to get the whites brighter, it washes out the corners and the wires blend with the background. Any photographers out there have suggestions in how I can get my light tent photos nice and crisp like this one by Jeffrey Bail? Feedback of “buy a DSLR” is unacceptable.
Buy a DSLR.
Er, um, okay. Real suggestions? I would say to forget about the shutter speed and look at the aperture. Try f11 or higher (making the aperture smaller). If you do this in Aperture Priority (Av), the camera will choose the appropriate shutter speed to go with (which will automatically be longer).
Also, set the camera to one aperture, and try different exposures (forcing it to go certain amounts of stops up and then down). I’m not sure how you do that on your camera, but I’d bet that the option is there…..
Unfortunately the maximum aperture my camera can achieve is around f8, I believe. I’ve messed with the exposure a bit, but there is too much white for me to really be able to increase that too much.
Hrrrmmm…
Okay, I’m about to show my total ignorance of all things photographical here: metering? 🙂
Where are you metering? If you meter for the white, you get a faster shutter speed. If for the black, a slower shutter speed. You can bring out the detail in the shadows in PS…