Lightbox Photography

When looking for indoor photography ideas, I came across some pictures of thinly sliced fruit and vegetables photographed on a light box.  I decided to give it a try.  I used Amy's light box that she got for Christmas a couple years ago for the job.

Amy was willing to let me do this because she planned to take the remainder of the citrus fruits and make sangria with it.  Can't let the rest of that good fruit go to waste!  I used lemon, lime, orange and a red onion (this last one did not go into the sangria).

The setup consists of the light box on which I placed a piece of tracing paper to reduce the amount of juice that got on the surface of the light box.  I then put my tripod in a configuration that allowed me to hang the camera directly over the light box and pointing straight down.  In order to ensure an even depth of field, the camera lens should be parallel to the surface of the box.  Metering the shot needed to be done with a bit of trial and error because the uniform light box brightness will fool the camera's meter and will tend to underexpose, much like a bright winter scene.   Most shots were taken with the  105mm macro lens.  In order to get a shot with more of the slices in the frame I used my 17-55mm f2.8 zoom at 55mm.  Even though this is a DX lens, from about 24mm and up it will cover the full frame sensor of the Nikon D750.  I've also included a picture of the setup that I took with my iPhone.  Hope you enjoy this week's pictures.

Setup for this week's shots.