a DIY home mini photostudio for snakes?

[Jafar]

i tried to make some good pictures of my snakes today for my new website.
I used a curverbox, and made a sort of hammock in it from a bedsheet. But the 2 normal light i shined on it where not bright/white enough, so all my pictures are to dark, and actually just bad..

What do you guys use to photograph your snakes?

Here are some pics i took:

The butter/caramel/golddust or whatever with autocorrect:

without autocorrect but made lighter manually:

The Snow:

And one that is close to my goal, and the only one taken with flash (but hard shadows and contrast because of it)

 

[TheAlchemist]

I see a couple things that could help you out. The bed sheet has too much texture. Try white paper inside a box. Next, what kind of camera are you using? (Kind of looks like a cell phone). If you cant get your hands on a fancy SLR, at least make sure the lighting is good. Most lower end cameras take bad photos in dim conditions. Lastly, there is the all mighty Photoshop where you can correct just about anything.

 

[Mari]

I would also address your lighting - looks like you've got a really warm light. Try getting a more neutral colored light to photograph with, that'll give you more true coloring. And a cardboard box painted white/covered in white paper would work well. TheAlchemist is right, your sheet has too much texture.

 

[Kat_Dog]

http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-make-a-inexpensive-light-tent
http://www.instructables.com/id/Super-Simple-Light-Tent/


They're the same thing, just different sites.
I was gonna make one of these out of PVC pipe until I found this tutorial. Still haven't made one, but that's because I haven't had the right size box come into our house yet D:


Also, I suggest never cutting out your picture and pasting it onto a white background, it makes it look cheesy.

 

[SquamishSerpents]

You'd be surprised what you can do with very little equipment! The following were all taken using a small piece of melamine as the "background" that the snakes were placed onto. I used a low-end DSLR (Nikon D90) and a speedlite. Bounce the speedlite off the ceiling and you'll never want a light tent ever again, because essentially the room will become your softbox.

Even if you don't have a DSLR, there are a lot of cameras out there that have hot-shoe mounts, and you can buy external flashes for quite cheap.

White balance is probably the biggest thing when photographing snakes, and Adobe Photoshop CS2 is free on their website. It's very easy to correct WB with Photoshop and the WB dropper tool.

A lot of the high-end looking photos you'll see have been processed from raw files, too. Not saying you can't get good results by shooting in jpeg, but raw is far more flexible (though with raw, you HAVE to run them through raw processing software)

These examples were shot in raw, on a Nikon D90 with a SB600 speedlite aimed at the ceiling. I opened them in Photoshop, applied a tiny bit of sharpening (raw files don't have any sharpening applied to them straight out of camera, though jpegs do) and I corrected the white balance. Not much else was done to these photos, though I may have whitened the corners a bit where there was some light falloff.

 

[Jafar]

Thanks guys.. the photo's where taken with a Sony Alpha 350.
I hope to get my flash back soon, someone borrowed it 6 months ago.. and said he already returned is.. grr..

Whiter light is a good tip! thanks!

 

[SquamishSerpents]

The Alpha 350 is a great little camera. Sony does good stuff!

A flash will help you immensely. It will allow you to use a faster shutterspeed (freezing motion) and a smaller aperture (more snake in focus) without the trade-off of the photo being too dark.

 

[Jafar]

Whell.. i got my big flash back! so i tried again, with smouth white surface ..
Better right?

 

[SquamishSerpents]

Dude! They are awesome! Spectacular job

 

[Blue Apple Herps]

Great job! I like to use a piece of poster board that I curve against the wall and floor (or some other larger 90º object). I use painters tape to hold it up on the wall. Plenty big enough to get your snake on it, and the curve of the poster board gives it a seamless look. It'll help you get "angled" shots so you don't have to shoot down on top of the snake.

I also always bounce the flash off of the ceiling. For me anyways, it seems to give the best, most accurate representation of the snake. Doesn't give any harsh bright spots or over expose the snake to give false colors.

Here are a couple of examples where you can see how there's no obvious edge to the background:

Also works with black poster board:

 

[kc261]

Matthew, thanks for the poster board tip. I'll have to try that.

 

[Jafar]

Thanks.. That would be my next step.. From an other angle. This time i wantend iT From above, to show the whole snake and his pattern.