Beer = happy

So I finally got my light tent built and set up on the weekend and took a few test shots. For lack of other suitable subjects, I decided to use a bottle of one of my favourite types of beer, Sleeman Fine Porter. (Very tasty. If you like dark beers, I highly recommend sampling it.)

Overall, the tent worked, but not to my satisfaction. The lighting was too dark and a little too spotty, but by shooting in raw mode I was able to adjust the white balance fairly easily. I also had a little fun with the background colour... I'm not sure, but I think I like the blue better.



So, now I have to experiment with alternative lighting. I have a few ideas, I'll try them out and see what comes out of it.

DIY photo studio

Interesting... A case of beer, a few sheets of paper towel, and a few sheets of printer paper combine to form a photo studio. A pretty decent one, actually, at least for the purpose this guy's putting it to -- taking decent photos for eBay.

DIY eBay Photo Studio, from a person named Jesse, apparently.

I think I'll create my own version of this... I have some larger items that I need to take pictures of, so a case of beer probably won't be big enough. Still, I should be able to produce something relatively cheap. :-)

Cookies!

Andrea and her mother made delicious, life-giving cookies. Being a nerd, I took pictures of them rather than eating them.

This particular shot was taken with about a half-second exposure time, on a tripod. Lighting was provided by a single incandescent bulb over the stove. The full shot has another row of cookies at the front, but they were so out of focus it really screwed up the image, so I cropped them out. I'd have retried the image with the camera looking further up (bringing the in-focus cookie to the bottom third instead of the top third, where it originally was) but the way the table and everything was set up, I would have been looking past the cookies and into other stuff, and it would have looked kinda dumb. So there you go.

Distracted by shiny objects

Shiny gold fake plant thingie that was on top of a box of chocolates my boss gave me. I used a flash but also a long exposure, and since I didn't have a tripod the camera shook a bit, making the object look just a bit ethereal.

My new home!

I take a lot of non-baby photos and don't want to fill up Thomas's blog with them, so I might as well set up a new blog to host them. Yay new blog!