I’ve finally unpacked my new light tent and shot my first image using it. This shot nicely illustrates how easy it is to get a clean white background with this set up.

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For the white background I didn’t have to use any backlighting, just a white card propped up inside the tent behind and quite close to the subject. The ultra soft lighting was provided by my SB800 plus my Chimera softbox angled at 45 degrees and set up just touching the outside of the light tent’s top right corner. This delivers a degree of top and side lighting with some feathering so as to retain some modelling and tonal contrast. The technique is a particularly apt one for photographing both metal and glass with the small amount of light fall off it provides, of which more in a future post. Once again I used my 70-300mm zoom at the long end to flatten the perspective a degree. Because of the limited depth of field I finished the shot off with the addition of a small amount of film grain to the mid and dark tones in Photoshop to give a slight “tooth” or texture to the out of focus areas.

The light tent I eventually settled for was a little larger (approximately a 3ft cube) than I would mostly need and is a little unwieldy but I’ve found it worth putting up with that because it’s so much easier, with the extra space inside, to fix up backgrounds, light and dark reflectors etc. Using a light tent makes all sorts still life shots so much easier that I’m wondering why I’ve shied away from using one in the past. Oh well, we live and learn. All in all a recommended accessory if you do much still life work - especially for glass and metallic surfaces but useful for all sorts of other subjects too!