Flashlight photography

What are the methods that you guys use to photograph flashlights.
Sometime I can't seem to get the glare off my flashlights espicially if it is a silver color.
It would help if you mentioned the type of lighting used.
I have the canon powershot A75 which seems to take great pictures (considering its price) of everything except flashlights.
I have seen some amazing pics here and I wonder how it is done,

I use this setup.


1000W Halogens

Are you using the flash? Dont, those will make glare if you use teh cams flash.

Also, a white sheet between the lights and the flashlight will help defuse the light.
Also, try changing the lighting angles so its not reflecting th eglare to the camera.

~John

This picture is pretty self explanatory:



The box is a wine box painted white on the inside, you must drink the 6 bottles in the building process, thats the fun part

And here is the last pic I took:



Then you need to play with the manual settings of your camera, forget about using the auto settings.

I used: iso 50, 1/100 to 1/160 speed, F6.3, 2secs delay shooter, manual set white balance, macro, no zoom, no flash


My 2 cents (of peso)


Pablo
PS: Jtice was my teacher

This has been discussed before, but it's hard to find in the archives right now.

There are other ways to do it without using such complex setups. The setups shown above are the right way to do it, BTW.

One of the simpler tricks is to simply use bright room lights and a tripod. If using the flash, back off several feet (5 or 6) and use the telephoto (zoom) feature of the camera with the resolution set to it's highest / best. Do the final cropping and sizing with the computer's software.

The tripod allows slow shutter speeds such as 1/15 of a second without any blurring. The distance diminishes the glare from the flash.

Add side lighting from other sources, including your other flashlights set 1 to 5 feet away.

Cropping a 640x480 pixel image from a 2560x1920 image is like having a n extra 16x zoom when compared to resizing that same picture down to 640x480.

Play with the white balance. You can get many different tints. If you don't understand white balance, make sure a white piece of paper is somewhere in the picture's background so the camera can guess what kind of light is being used. You can crop the paper out later.

The picture below was taken using the techniques I just described.


Daniel

Thanks for the tips.
jtice now i can stop wonderinf how you take such good pics. that is a sweet setup.
PEU , thanks for sharing your setup.
I do not have powerful halogen lamps now. So I have to go with gadget lover's method which is ingenious. That is a neat tip , about taking the photo from a distance to reduce glare and using the max image size.

This pic was taken a month back . Manual setting, three layers of tissue paper put on the flash ,distance about one feet.
The silver mag has been polished to get the shine.
Can do without the glare. Will try the above mentioned methods

Wow! Pretty!

Those are hard to photograph. The steeper the angle (from the flat surfaces) the less the glare and the fewer reflections. It's hard to avoid reflections on the minimag head, but you can put a plain dark cloth in front of it to keep reflections of your room out of the picture. I can't quite read your teeshirt.


Daniel

Wow gadget lover
what observant eyes you have!
I think it is a Ms-- XP free tee shirt

Don't have any desk setup for flashlight photography, I only use a lightbox when photographing watches due to the crystal reflecting back light and obscuring the dial. In short, don't use the flash, have good macro. Picture composition plays a big part in any photography subject.

yes if you have patience to set up defusers. then Great!!!

just as important is a steady hand, proper angles and of course proper lighting.

to use a flash successfully close up you must be XX distance away from subject. that distance is different for each camera.

to fill up your screen, one must either get close or use telephoto option.

best to use combination of both. back up enough to avoid wash from flash, at same time use telephoto to fill up frame.

then if you cannot get close enough without flash washing everything out. then put out altenative light and shoot without flash.

here's a hand held flash shot at 1040 X 758 resolution. more megapix doesnot always = sharper picture.

multi-level hand held macro shots like this one is technically way more dificult to get sharp VS shooting entire lights.

My portable studio setup. Canon 10D being run by laptop, three really cheap "booster" flashes on small "ballhead" tripods, and my home made light tent (a PVC frame and a nice white sheet). Plus a flash on the camera and a "modeling light" to help me set things up.


It's a nice setup as it is completely portable allowing me to go to a clients location instead of them boxing all of their stuff up to bring over to me.

daaaaayyyyymmnn those are some sophisticated setups!

Guess what I do...

I put the light on a sheet of white paper on the floor, in somewhere that's dimly lit, so that the ambient light doesn't taint the picture too much, then just pop up the onboard flash on my Canon 350D and blast it. Too lazy to build even a cheap lightbox although I honestly should, but the pix have been turning out more or less OK.

My A2 pictures were shot this way.


zespectre: just curious, what lens is that on the 10D?

Ledean said:

Wow gadget lover
what observant eyes you have!
I think it is a Ms-- XP free tee shirt

Click to expand...

You mean I was right????? It was MS? I'm impressed too!


Note the neat trick used by Zespectre to use a curving piece of paper/metal/cardboard behind his subject. That keeps angles out of the picture and, if I remember correctly, makes it kind of float.

I gotta remember to do that next time.

Daniel

As I was showering (I know, but that's where my mind tends to roam....) I realized that the common theme in all of the setups, pro and amateur alike, was the use of a tripod.

If you look closely, you'll see that some of the tripods, like Pablo's are small and super cheap; $8.99 at the local drug store (Longs) for a table top model that's kind of twisty. Others, like Jtice's floor model was on sale (at walmart) for only $39. The exact design is not critical for table top photography.

The key here is that the tripod lets you set up the camera, frame the shot, adjust the lights and take the picture under controlled circumstances. The tripod limits shaking, so you can use real slow shutter speeds without bluring.

When possible, a remote control is even better for triggereing the camera since the act of pushing the button will cause some movement. You don't have a remote? Try the 'delay timer' function. That lets you trip the shutter then stand back as the picture is taken 5 to 20 seconds later.

The following shot was taken from 18 inches using macro mode, then cropped to size. The shutter speed was 1/20th of a second. The lighting was from a ARC LS held in my hand.




Whenever possible, clean the light with a lint free cloth before taking the shot and use a photo editor to clean up the picture. It's amazing how every scratch and piece of lint shows up in close up pictures.

Daniel

Some great advise here ! :thumbsup:

Also you might wanna consider the set-up of the photo ... the background etc. is very important to the look.

This ...


... is always better than this:



I never ever used sophisticated set-ups. My trick is quantity and not quality. Usually I light the scene with one or more flashlights and shoot just by hand, even at very long exposures and mostly without flash. To compensate for this highly unprofessional set-up :green: I take dozens and dozens of pics of the same scene and usually there is at least one of good quality among them. The others I just delete. This is a very fast way.


Also ... some non-white light-accents can be cool:




Lightning the reflector with a weak 5mm white or blue LED can do wonders:




Or put it on a mirror in a completey dark room and light it very dimly with a combo of flashlights that will remove most of the shadows (or not, at your discretion). This way you'll get rid off the annoying reflections of the ceiling and other stuff, but the exposure will be really long:





Sometime less is more, in this case ... color:




bernie

gadget lover, excellent macro!!

here's a hand held macro shot thru three lens at 768 x 1024 with no cropping. very_technical shot

You can get decent shots without fancy cameras or trickery. This pic was taken with a low-end Canon S230 by an unskilled photographer .

Very nice setup zespectre,
I use that same program when doing time laspe shots.

I have been thinking about getting some of those remote flashes, what type do you have, and what do you think of them?
Does it seem to work out better then constant lighting?

~John

cy said:

gadget lover, excellent macro!!

here's a hand held macro shot thru three lens at 768 x 1024 with no cropping. very_technical shot

Click to expand...

Nice work there, Cy. What was the technique?


I'm amazed at all the nice work you guys have done. Since I have no talent, mine are not artistic. I settle for technically clean and clear!

jtice said:

Very nice setup zespectre,

I use that same program when doing time laspe shots.



I have been thinking about getting some of those remote flashes, what type do you have, and what do you think of them?

Does it seem to work out better then constant lighting?



~John

Click to expand...

I have three of the el-cheapo Quantaray MS-1 (Ritz Camera) The real trick was I had to buy another cheap flash with a manual control on it otherwise the TTL pre-flash would trigger the MS-1's too early. So I wound up buying a Quantaray QTB-7500 with the QDA-CAF module. It doesn't meter right if I try to run it TTL, but I don't care, I have other flashes for that. This one gets used on it's 1/16 MANUAL setting and it's only purpose is to trigger the boosters.



I have three 500 watt and two 250 watt halogens but honestly the constant light was just too damn hot to keep using. I'm finding (after some learning curve time) that I get much better results with the flashes. Of course they only have one output so I have to play with gobos to moderate things to the way I want, but it's not at all bad for a setup that ran me about $100 (Hell I've spent more than that on ONE hotlight).



I use the MS-1's mounted on the Quantaray - QT II-25 EZ Compact Tripod for flexability. Actually a nice little ballhead tripod (and only $10 each) with some weight and nice extendable legs. If I'm not doing tabletop I pull out my other full size tripods.



I get teased that my two favorite things in the world are flashlights and photography and I have to keep explaining that my FAVORITE thing in the world is LIGHT and how it behaves!