Colleen Easley

I’m finally getting serious about making a digital inventory of our belongings and to do that I want to take photographs of all our collectibles.  Since I now have a spare bedroom dedicated to just my photography stuff, I’ve been working on setting up a table and my speedlights to make the photos.  Even though the quality of these photos will not be critical, I want to do more than just a straight on flash to practice using the Nikon creative lighting techniques detailed in the video – “Nikon School presents A Hands-on Guide to Creative Lighting” hosted by Bob Krist and Joe McNally.

For my first photo I choose a basket hand made by an Alaskan artist.  I put it on a white fabric background and put Nikon speedlights on either side of it with their defusers attached.  I played around with a combination of halogen pole lamps and the ceiling light which has compact florescent bulbs in it.  After many attempts to get the picture right, I finally settled on using a slow sync flash, with aperture priority set to f/11.  I found if I used the standard flash setting, the low f-stop caused some parts of the basket to be out of focus due to the shallow dept of field.

I can’t believe how long it took to get a shot I was happy with.  I’d take 5-6 shots and then upload them to the computer.  It seemed they never looked the same on the computer as on the LCD of the camera.  I’ll have to be truthful here and say that I tried so many light combinations that when I finally went back to this particular shot, I had forgotten what external lights I had on when I shot it.  But I do know I had the white balance set to K (3850 kelvins B2).  I’m thinking I have lots to learn before I get my formula right.

The odd thing is that the background was really white and I was striving for white by changing the white balance and lamp combination, but in the end I actually liked the pastel background of this shot.

Nikon D90 with Tamron 90mm Macro lens, shutter 1/1.3, f/11, ISO 200