You may recall I wrote an article on how to photograph an object against a white…..and I mean pure white…..background using gear that costs a little over $1000, not including the camera. Not only that, it wound up being a royal pain-in-the-a** to do it. Well, I have since found a MUCH easier way to do the same thing, using common household stuff such as a plastic storage tub from K-Mart. Even if you include the cost of one or two speedlight flashes, the gear costs MUCH less…..$200 tops….than the gear in my first article.

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The Concept

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For those of you who are considering investing in a bunch of seamless backgrounds…..say white, black, various colors……in a word, “don’t”. Get white…..just white. You can use a white background in any way you want, in any color you want, all without resorting to Photoshop. How? Well, you need lights; either studio strobes or some speedlights, some color gels, and a decently-sized room. If you are so equipped, then a white seamless background is all you’ll need!

The idea is really simple. You light your subject completely independent of the background. If your subject is far enough from said background, any light-spill will not impact on the background at all. In this way, you can set up 2 separate light zones; one for the subject and one for the background.

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To Recap

In my previous post I did sort of a not-so-in-depth comparison between Apple’s Aperture and Adbobe’s Lightroom. In that article I mentioned that I needed to do tethered shooting on a a Macbook Air I recently bought, and because it had OS X 10.7 (Lion) installed, my Canon 5D was not tethering to Lightroom.

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I recently bought an 11″ MacBook Air so I could do tethered shooting on location. Unfortunately, Adobe Lightroom would not recognize my Canon 5D while tethered via a USB cable. After a little research and a phone call to Adobe, I verified that this is a bug exclusive to Lightroom on OS X Lion. I decided to try out Apple’s Aperture to see how well it would do with tethering my 5D. Well, it turns out that Aperture works great for tethering. As a result, I decided to give Aperture a good hard look. Adobe told me very specifically that they would not have a fix for Lightroom for at least several months. Since I’ve been able to use Aperture on my Macbook Air for several weeks now, I feel that I can compare the two programs and give you some insight into which one is better.

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I get this question a lot. And I think most novice photographers agonize over which lens will allow them to take amazing photos. Let’s set the record straight up front. A lens, like a camera doesn’t take great photos……the photographer does. In a very real sense, the camera doesn’t matter….any one who knows me knows that I say that a lot…..and mean it. However, I feel that LENSES are much more important than camera bodies.

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