Hello!

So, on Thursday I built myself a mini photo studio for shooting product photos.

Got myself a large cardboard moving box, white paper table cloth and some clips, cut open windows on three sides, then lined the box with the table cloth, gluing and taping it firmly in place. In the end, I cut holes in the back to fit the two clips that hold the background sheet.

Unfortunately I forgot to buy cardboard sheets for the background, so I had to improvise, folding some tablecloth to make it a bit sturdier, with less than satisfactory result as it didn't keep a shape.

I attached the folded tablecloth to the back of the box, and voilà, a makeshift tabletop mini studio was ready!

It didn't look like much, but kind of works.

The flash is on the left, and the floodlight can be seen on the sofa, on the right side.

I used an IR remote to trigger the camera, since I realized on Wednesday that the camera shakes quite a lot even after 2 seconds after pressing the shutter manually.

This one came out pretty nicely.

I only had to clean up the photo a bit. Which reminds me. I've been using this new tool I found added on Darktable:

Healing tool

The Healing tool incorporates content aware way of hiding dust or blemishes in photos. A feature that has been on Gimp and Photoshop for decades now and has been gravely missing from Darktable earlier.

I'm very glad it's now here, because it brings Darktable further on par with its commercial rivals.

I also ended up making some experimenting by using the white box...

The above photo was shot at 30th of a second while the spinner was spinning. The movement would have been completely blurred out without the flash.

Because it is somewhat fast, you can freeze movement to an extent just by triggering the flash. So you don't always have to rely on the shutter speed only.

(Being a test shot, the result was badly underlit at F8. Bringing the exposure up in post took away much of its quality. Also see the blue tint, as the white balance was adjusted to the led floodlight on the right.)