![]() ![]() The Traditional Approachīefore you get scared off by the thought of needing lots of specialized lighting equipment and light modifiers, bear in mind that the traditional approach to tabletop photography doesn’t really require much gear. For that, the traditional approach to tabletop lighting may be preferable. A black card can be used to introduce negative fill to one side of the subject, but overall, the setup inside a box makes the fine-tuning that comes from changing size, position and distance of lights and modifiers difficult if not impossible. This is particularly true of boxes with LED lights built in as they’re always providing flat light that’s somewhat omnidirectional. Because each side of the box and its top are just inches from the subject, it’s particularly difficult to add and subtract light from different sides of the subject. The devil is in the details, after all, and the problem with most light tents is that they don’t allow for the fine control that can be achieved when lighting with a larger, more open tabletop setup. ![]() The ultimate limitation of the lightbox is the nuance that’s eliminated from the process. But if your subject is bigger than a breadbox, you’re going to run into trouble. That’s no problem if you’re photographing a shoe, hand tool or piece of jewelry. If you’re a manual shooter, you’ll want to open up a couple of stops from the exposure indicated by the camera’s TTL meter or use a handheld incident light meter to precisely measure the amount of light falling on the subject.Īnother problem with lightboxes is that they’re fairly small. As the four-shot example here illustrates, in automatic exposure modes using exposure compensation of +2 or even more may be necessary to create the bright white background and proper exposure for the subject. Why? Because the camera’s TTL meter is going to see all of that white in the box and assume it should be rendered more like middle gray. Aiming your camera into the light tent and shooting at the indicated meter reading, or using an automatic exposure mode, tends to produce gray, underexposed images. While pop-up light tents certainly make product photography simple and convenient, they’re not a replacement for an understanding of how cameras and lighting work. Because shiny objects “see” whatever is around them, the seamless, all-encompassing nature of a lightbox makes those reflections consistent and visually appealing. Light tents are tremendously helpful in this regard. Because they’re small and portable enough to conveniently travel with, a photographer can easily take their studio on location to anywhere they need.Īnyone who has ever photographed a highly reflective subject (such as metal jewelry, shiny flatware or other polished surfaces) knows how essential it is to have seamless reflections in the surface of the subject. In either case, lightboxes excel at creating soft, even illumination-the kind of thing that is perfect for showing the detail in a product or to illuminate small objects in a simple, straightforward manner. A typical speedlight-style flash works perfectly for this, and in a pinch, even the incandescent light from a living room lamp can be positioned to provide the source for the lightbox. They’re compact so they can be set up on a table or desk in the tiniest of spaces.įor boxes that don’t have LED lights built in, their translucent sides and top mean you have to add your own illumination. ![]() Some lightboxes-such as the Flashery box shown here-have LED lights built in so there’s literally nothing else needed (aside from the camera, of course). Inside is a white sweep of paper or plastic on which the product sits, designed to eliminate any hint of a horizon line for a truly seamless background. They’re made of lightweight plastic or sometimes a collapsible metal frame that stretches translucent white fabric to form the box. Pop-up lightboxes are ideal for photographers who don’t have a traditional studio space or loads of lighting equipment. To that end, here are a few good reasons to use a lightbox, what you can expect from such a device and when to graduate from it to a more traditional tabletop setup. And that’s not quite what pop-up lightboxes are best for. While there are certainly good reasons to consider using a light tent, more often than not the inquiring mind is looking for a shortcut to great results. In my studio product photography class, students invariably inquire about whether they could use a pop-up lightbox (also called a light tent) for their tabletop photography endeavors. ![]()
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