You may remember some weeks ago, I was all happy and giddy about some little clip-on lights I found in a dump table.  Reader Ben of Midnight Tease fame thought they'd be just the ticket for a little problem he's had, namely photographing his anime figures.  After searching through eight other stores, and finding only one more set of them (which I greedily claimed for myself), I admitted defeat.  Then I found something cheaper, more flexible (literally), and probably better off all-around for his purposes.


Specifically, really friggin' cheap clip-on booklights.

Walgreens is selling them at five for $5.00.  Each is a single LED, powered by the same three watch batteries as the clip-on lights I was extolling the virtues of earlier, with a flexi-neck, making it ridiculously easy to point where-ever you'd like.  When I told him about this, Ben seemed a little dubious... unsurprising, since I don't think about stuff like this the way most people do! 

See, this is just lighting design for the stage, writ small.  Back in high school, college and grad school, I worked with 500w or 1000w lighting instruments (and a single 5000w fresnel, once) every day.  Now?  I do the same stuff, just with much teenier lights.  So, instead of trying to explain how they'd work without being visible or anything, I threw together a quick little arrangement, using just three of these booklights... like so:

Any lighting designer will recognize this layout as a basic McCandless, just without the warm/cool dichotomy (I didn't have any gel handy).  It provides great overall coverage to the front, while allowing just a hint of shadow to provide depth to the target... a straight-on front light washes out the shadows, which looks unnatural.  The warm and cool gels in a  McCandless generate extra depth as well, but that's for another post.  The red light poking over the back provides some backlighting to pop the figure out of the plain white background.  So now that we see what we're actually DOING with the lights, let's take a look at the result.

Not bad for about two minutes worth of work, not too bad at all.  If the background was a little farther away, you'd barely notice the shadows, and if I had color on the lights, things would pop even more.  And the whole setup is essentially invisible to the camera.  Pretty cool what you can do with just three LEDs, no?

^{For those wondering, she's Tsubaki from Please Twins!, and the figure is one I got out of a trading figure blind-box (though not that exact series).}

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:54 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 437 words, total size 3 kb.