"Craft" project

So for lack of a better title, I have been working on a "craft" project the past couple of nights.  With inspiration from a previous post showing a picture I had taken of a fly I tied, it hit me that I could do better.  And since I had all the camera equipment to make that possible, I set out to see what others do.

I surfed and surfed and saw some themes of how people set up to take good pictures of flies and I built my own "portable studio."  The total cost of this project for me was $0.00.  I just happen to have all the crap crafty stuff I needed around the house to make this thing.

I grabbed a mid sized cardboard box and mutilated it with a razor.  The idea was that the object inside the box would be lit up by lights outside the box, hence the holes on the opposite sides and the top.

Then, I added the "deluxe" option to this project which was adding a piece of Velcro to the back of the box and to the back of various colored file folders.

To the bottom of the box I taped in some white ink jet glossy photo paper to reflect light back up to the bottom side of the fly.

I re-enforced the box with packaging tape and then covered the openings with two layers of that gifty tissue paper stuff.  Here now, is the set up.  The camera is a good distance away because the lense I am using is the Nikkor 70-300 with the Macro option.  So, unlike a normal macro lense, I needed a little distance before the vise and fly where in focus.

The other thing you will notice is the vice is in front of the box instead of inside it.  After a couple of hours of messing around with different positions of the flash and trying to get it to work with the slave flash, I had to change tactics.  I wasn't getting good lighting, or when I did a huge shadow would be cast upon the background making for a serious distraction.

Once I brought it out in front of the box, the shadow issue disappeared and I could adequately light the fly enough for a descent picture that could go along with a pattern description.  It's obvious that I'm no Jim Schollmeyer, but I have to start somewhere.

So here are some of the pictures that I did while playing around with this project.