Make a Mini Photo Studio with LED Lighting

Want to create a miniature photography studio ideal for small-scale product photography? You can, by using very cheap Test an LED that give you extremely fine-grained control over your lighting. The best part is that you can make one for almost no money at all!

Steps

  1. Buy a bunch of LEDs. The more, the better. LEDs are so ridiculously cheap that you may as well buy a bagful of them in different varieties.

    • Individual LEDs, of course, give you the most precise control over your lighting. Unless you know what you're doing, don't buy LEDs by themselves; you'll have to worry about power sources, wiring and so on, all of which takes time better spent on having fun taking photographs. The easiest (and hardly more expensive) way is to buy some cheap novelty LED key-chains; they invariably come with batteries included, and you get a free switch thrown in, too.
    • Cheap multi-LED torches are another good source of LED lighting. You'll want a couple of these. Bear in mind that the directed, multi-LED light from one of these will massively overpower your single LEDs. You'll want to diffuse the light with thin paper, such as cigarette rolling papers. Don't buy anything that doesn't have batteries included.
  2. Set up your mini studio. You'll want a plain-coloured backdrop to shoot against; find yourself a relatively thick piece of A2 or A3 card, or a few sheets of paper if you want to be really cheap. Optionally, a piece of glass under your subject works well to cut out harsh shadows under your subject, and the reflections look somewhat cool to boot.
  3. Clean everything. When photographing small things, every last speck of dust will show up in your final picture, and you'll find yourself spending way too long clone-brushing it out in Photoshop or GIMP later on. Make sure both your subject and your studio are meticulously clean, or at least as close to it as you can be bothered to get.
  4. Set up your camera. Because nothing's moving, speed doesn't matter here, so you can take as much time as you need to get it looking as good as it can — that means low ISOs, small apertures for depth of field, and (consequently) long exposures. You'll also need to set up your camera to deal with the weird colour balance typical of LEDs.

    • Get it on a tripod. If you don't have a tripod, get one, even the cheapest, nastiest plastic tripod you can find. You'll be looking at taking some very long exposures (into the seconds), so you can rule out hand-holding the camera. If you have a remote release (or self-timer) and a mirror lock-up, use these too.
    • Set your white balance. Bright "white" LEDs actually have a significant blue/purple shift. If you're too lazy to use a grey card and set a custom white balance (even if your camera supports it), your best bet here is to set it to "Auto", and pray (which is how all the example photos here were done). If your camera guesses it wrong, you can always fix this later in software.
    • Set your camera to aperture-priority auto-exposure if you have it. Because we're taking photographs of relatively small things at short distances, you're going to need every bit of depth of field you can get. Use the small aperture you have, typically anywhere between f/16 and f/32.[1]
    • Turn down your camera's ISO as low as it will go, and don't use "Auto" if you have it. Lower ISOs mean less noise and longer shutter speeds; we don't care about the latter (since we're not in a rush and nothing's moving) and less noise is always better.
    • Use a longer focal length. The 55mm end of a digital SLR kit lens will do just fine if you don't have something longer. Just don't get closer than you have to; small things look weird if you get too close.[2]
  5. Set up your lighting. This is art, not science, so nobody can tell you how it should look. Just take your many LEDs and move them around until things look just about right, and your scene is consistently lit (or inconsistently lit, if your art requires that).
  6. Shut off any other light sources, artificial and natural. The point of using LEDs is for total, minute control over your lighting; with their limited power, even the weakest incandescent lightbulb can overpower them. Close your curtains and turn off the lights.
  7. Take a few photos. Look on your LCD and check the exposure. If it's consistently over - or under - exposed (look for blown-out or nearly blown-out highlights, or crappy shadows), set some exposure compensation and try again. If only part of it is incorrectly exposed (assuming this is not the effect you're looking for), then keep moving lights around and adding new ones until it looks good. Digital makes this easy, and free, so experiment away.

    Don't throw away anything but the most pathologically badly-exposed shots; you can keep these around for painting in lost detail with layer masks, ghetto HDR style, in software later on.
  8. Do whatever you need to in software to fix up a final version of your image. This will inevitably involve removing dust, fixing the colour balance and probably some selective sharpening as well.

Tips

  • Taking the time to set a custom white balance using a neutral gray card (available at any camera store) works better than prayer. It will save you time in the long run and will give you a better image.
  • While you've got the gray card out, use it to set the exposure as well. It will give you a more accurate exposure and better image than most people can achieve with photo editing software afterward.

Things You'll Need

  • A pile of cheap LED keychains and a few torches; see earlier for further elaboration on this point.
  • A digital camera. Digital SLRs are great, but whatever you have should be sufficient.
  • A plain background to photograph against, and (optionally) a sheet of glass to go on top.
  • Cigarette rolling papers or grease-proof paper, for diffusing the light from your larger torches.
  • A neutral gray card to set a custom white balance and the exposure.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ You may worry that diffraction effects will start to become an issue at these kinds of very small apertures, and you'd be right. However, this is less of an issue than depth of field.
  2. ↑ See Product Photography by Ken Rockwell.
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