I use the Olympus D-600L at work to photograph telecommunications equipment (such as radios, components, PC boards) containing highly reflective metal surfaces. Existing lighting (fluorescent) is poor, so it's difficult to obtain consistently sharp focus.

The camera produces excellent results when used outdoors at noon under a solid overcast layer. Unfortunately, I can't control the weather or haul large pieces of equipment outdoors. Can I imitate this color of light with a couple of SoLux lamps? And, will diffusers help to eliminate the glare?

Are there any other lighting options that will provide optimal conditions for my D-600L? I don't think slave flash units will help.

-- Angelina Bostwick (abostwic@harris.com), December 07, 1998

Answers

Hi Angelina,

To get a nice soft light, as you found out, an overcast day is ideal. To mimic that, they make portable light modifiers that can be placed on external flash units. The biggest I've seen is around 12". Years ago, I had a flash bracket that allowed me to put a very small Larsen reflectasol umbrella with my big battery operated Ascor 1600 handle mount strobe. I made sure that my flash was at least one f/stop less than the ambient light. Look in the back of some of the photography magazines and there are all kinds of umbrellas, blow up light modifiers, etc.

By the way, what are solux lights?

Take care,

Phil Pool

-- Phil Pool (pep44@excite.com), December 08, 1998.

As Phil noted, a diffuser is the key here. Shiny surfaces reflect whatever's around them (no surprise), so they look best when there's large areas of illuminated surface for them to reflect. Pros use "soft boxes" around their strobes or hot lights - Chimera is a brand that's common. The size soft box you'll need will depend on the size of the object, and how close you can get the soft box to the subject. The Solux lamps produce an excellent approximation of the spectral balance of daylight (when run at ~16 volts), which is why we use them for our critical color testing, but for normal photography, you can rely greatly on the white-balance capabilities of your camera, plus maybe some help from a color-shifting filter.

My recommendation would be to invest in some quartz lights and high-temperature-tolerant softboxes, along with a set of 80A,B,C filters to adjust the color temperature. (80A will correct 3200K hot lights to something like daylight, but also cuts 2 f-stops of light - You may be able to get by with less correction (or none at all), using the camera's white balance capability.

Phil's suggestion of strobes plus softbox/diffuser is good also: You can get strobes with a "slave" capability that will work with digital cameras from SR Electronics, at http://www.srelectronics.com/. (You need special slaves, because most digicams pop the flash twice, once for metering, once for the shot - you want to trigger the slaves on the second pop, and the special slaves from SR will do this.) The advantage of strobes is they're safer and more comfortable to work around (no white-hot filaments!). The disadvantage is that they're harder to visualize the final lighting with.

-- Dave Etchells (detchells@imaging-resource.com), December 09, 1998.

The Perfect Solution! It took a while, but I combined digital and analog equipment and have had great luck. For standard portrait lighting, I use a Digi-slave 2000 flash bounced into a 24" umbrella about 4-5 feet from the subject at an acute angle. I use my White Lightning flash as fill on it's lowest setting 10 feet in front of the subject bounced off a 30 inch umbrella. The puny light from the Olympus sets off the Digi-Slave...which in turn sets off the White Lightning Flash. It's a great concept that should work for any number of users who have slave flash equipment for fill and/or main light. Try it!

-- Brad Meyer (bkmeyer@earthlink.net), January 18, 1999.