First Attempt at Macro Photography

Taking the DIY soft box found at the Strobist blog, I took some shots for my father in-law's golf club company for use on his website. There are largely untouched except for cropping and white balance adjustment. I wanted to show the mistakes I made. Overall, the box was great and did its job. The problem was I used too small of a box. Don't make this mistake. The Strobist recommends a box no smaller than 12"x12"x12". I believe one of my dimensions was 9": mistake 1.

Lighting used was lighting my father in-law had. He had four, 1000 candle watt lamps. He used them for high speed video: recording one's golf swing. He had something like a 10,000 fps video camera which of course required heavy duty lights. And heavy duty these lights were! You could see the heat emanating from these bad boys. I just used one lamp: mistake 2.

Also, you may not be able to tell from these images (I have others that show this more), but there is a definite gradient of light from left to right. The lamp was on the left side and above the box, so this makes sense. Not making mistake 2 could have helped this. Also, I think I could have gotten away with one lamp IF I had used a reflector or white posterboard on the right side of the box to reflect some light back: mistake 3. This would have done two things in my opinion: would have evened the light from left to right and probably would have eliminated the shadow underneath the club heads.

For construction, I picked up some tracing paper and white poster board from the art supply store. Cost was $7. A box was scrounged from my father in-law's house keepign with the theme of reusing as much materials as possible. However, I should have just picked up a box that would have been suitable for this project, probably would have cost under $3 and still would have had a soft box for under $10.

Chris' blog at http://chris-photo-journey.blogspot.com/2007/08/studio-session-with-light-tent.html used the same concept with infinite better results than I had. He also had the foresight to photograph the setup for all to see. I think he did an excellent job and his blog gave me the link for the soft box.

I guess I can't call my efforts completely failed. My father in-law is using the images on his website. The final images have the shadow removed and look just fine on his site. However, from a photographer's perspective, I feel I failed this lesson, however, I have learned valuable lessons from it and think I can correct the problems I ran into. And he quite generously gave me one of his lamps for further exploits. So I'll be experimenting with reflectors next time around. Also, the lamp, combined with some reflector, will probably

make a nice quickie portrait studio, if the model doesn't mind the heat from the lamp!

All in all, this was a fun project. I'll do it again some time. The key seems to be (aside from lighting of course) the size of the box and using some reflector if you are using only one light.