I started to play with my new light tent. It’s a cheap white semi-transparent box that can be used to produce shadowless photography you can find in online shops or in many other places. Mine has 4 interchangeable color backgrounds (white, black, red, ugly-blue). The material is for diffraction of light you put outside of the box. Here’s my sample setting:
On the left you can see a 65 W fluorescent lamp (~325 W lightbulb equivalent). You can buy those for less than 30 PLN (~$10). On the right there’s a tiny halogen lamp that warms the scene. This picture was taken with my normal light on (3 x 11 W bulbs) so you can imagine how bright those 65 W are. After lighting the scene I picked the black background and put it inside of the box. As you can see from the picture above this can be fun for both photographers and gynecologists.
My watch appears to be a perfect object for light tent photography so here’s an example of it on a black background.
I have also tried white background and a (not much) different angle. White balance is a bit off so the background appears to be blue.
Those shots were taken using my Sony a200 with 50 mm Zenitar @ f/2. Zenitar on a200 was a great choice for this kind of shots as it’s waaay sharper at f/2 than the kit 18-75 zoom lens at it’s horrible maximum f/6.3 when set on 50 mm. What comes right after – it’s much more bright (3⅓ steps) and with aperture ranging from f/2 to f/22 you can creatively think about the depth of field on your pictures. Here’s a photo of the magnificent Zenitar lens in a light tent:
Have fun!