Stendalen photo set-up

[Stendalen]

Hi all

Got a few questions regarding my photos, happy to recieve such good feedback . I have a very simple setup. A plastic polyethylene bottle, aluminium foil, photopapers I printed in different colours on my ink jet printer and two lamps.

The plastic bottle (used to contain 5 litre windshield washer fluid) spreads the light. I have vut it open as you see in the picture and dressed the "new" bottom with aluminium foil. That to reflekt the light so the under side of the fly is illuminated. On the top I made a slit so I can insert different background cards.

I have two lamps. Just standard desktop lamps, one that have a a "spot" effect (Jansjö led lamp from IKEA for under 10 bucks http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20169658/, the best fly tying lamp you can get .
The other lamp gives a main general light. I use the spot to illuminate the fly directly from above, very close to the PE bottle to get a spotlight effect or further away to reduce the effect.

Thats it basically. Then I do a few thhings in Lightroom/Photohop. Most important is the whitebalance and that can be tricky since I use two different light sources and olso the surrounding avialable light. Either I set the whitebalance directly with the camera (by now I usually know what value to use) or in Lightroom afterwards. A very good tool is to have a whitebalance reference card and take a shot of that placed where the fly is. Quick and easy task to just set the WB and tweak some basic parameters in one photo and then apply to all photos you took in that session (if you have Lightroom or similar software).

The photopapers I use I like because they reflects light (usually people tend to use non-reflecting back ground or place the background way out of focus). I use this effect as you can see in the first photo in my last post here in the flydressing area. Hopefully the last photo below shows that effect.

/Martin

[zen leecher]

very ingenious. Two thumbs up.

[Mataura mayfly]

Excellent tutorial.
We have similar bottles for milk containers here, I think one could get away with the 3 litre version.
Easy to find materials- and the price is right! Much sturdier than my own cardboard box with the sides cut out and tissue paper glued in place for a light diffuser.
Many thanks for divulging your set up.

[DUBBN]

I agree Jeff. That tutorial just cleared a lot of space from my tying area. I think I can find a 2 gallon peanut oil bottle.

[Stendalen]

Correction: it is a 3l bottle i've used.

Excellent tutorial.
We have similar bottles for milk containers here, I think one could get away with the 3 litre version.
Easy to find materials- and the price is right! Much sturdier than my own cardboard box with the sides cut out and tissue paper glued in place for a light diffuser.
Many thanks for divulging your set up.

[Stendalen]

And you could also cut a hole in the bottom for the vise And then just put it over your vise, shoot, remove... And continue to tye.

M

[fly_fischa]

Very cool Martin

Thanks for going to the effort. It's a nice compact setup and I like the fact you make use of your existing light source.
I've been toying with a similar idea for a while using a large round frosted glass lamp shade as a diffuser. You've just made my life a lot easier, why didn't I think of a milk bottle! Cheaper, less fragile, right amount of diffusion and easier to modify than glass. I can use my tying lights which both have daylight balanced bulbs so no manual white balance or post processing required Thanks again, I'll be drinking a lot of milk today

Karsten

[Stendalen]

Enjoy Karsten, the milk that is.
M

[letumgo]

Thank you Martin, for sharing your photo set-up. I need to make one of those set-ups too. Neat-o!

[hankaye]

Stendalen, Howdy;

Sometimes I think we tend to 'over think' things and go to much greater
lengths to achieve a goal than we need to. Your simple yet extreamly adequate
set-up shows this clearly. The results are stunning. Thank you for sharing your
set-up with us.

hank