| I'm fond of saying that cheap kit tends to be expensive in the long-run, as you end up replacing it with something better. However, I do make an exception where (a) I know I won't use the thing very often and (b) there is a huge price difference between cheap kit and expensive kit.
Table-top lighting systems are a case in point, so rather than pay £500+ for a professional system, I settled for a Chinese system for £70 (including delivery from China).
The system is an 80cm collapsible fabric cube, two flourescent lamps (with bulbs included) and two miniature lightstands. 
You only get two lights, so I used a desktop flourescent lamp at the rear to help white out the background:
Shooting tethered helps a lot, as you can see exactly what you're getting. I use Nikon Camera Control Pro for this. I shoot in manual mode so that I can adjust the exposure to suit.
The flourescent bulbs supplied are said to be daylight-balanced 5500K ones, but I found they were slightly on the warm side, so I manually set the colour temperature to 5300K.
The tent is large enough for some quite sizeable objects. This Sony laptop is very small, but my 17" Dell would fit comfortably inside also.
It folds up reflector-fashion to form a remarkably small package.
But enough with the waffle, let's see the results. These three things make excellent tests, all being shiny and generating nasty specular highlights in direct lighting. Here's how they looked when shot in the light-tent:
I think you'll agree the results are impressive. You do get some soft shadows, but personally I find that they help to anchor the objects. However, the shadows are easy to Photoshop out if you want full cutouts - this took less than 10 seconds:
I had to adjust the white-point a bit to get a completely whited-out background, but apart from shadow-removal in the Ensign shot, all the photos above were shot as JPEGs with no other manipulation beyond cropping & resizing for the web. |
