Beginner Light Box Photography

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Helen123

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Helen
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Hello, please can someone advise me. I am trying to photograph some jewellery using a light box but the background is coming out a grey colour. My light box says to change my EV to 1.3 - 1.7 to overcome this. I have no settings on my camera called EV. Please can someone tell me how to do this?

Thanks in advance.
 
Do you have any kind of brightness or exposure compensation controls on your camera? If so, set it for +1.5 stops extra exposure. If your camera is fully automated and has 'scene' type modes then see if it has one for use in snow.
 
Thought experiment: How does your camera know whether you're photographing a polar bear in a snowstorm or a black cat in a coal cellar at midnight? Answer: It doesn't. The camera's metering tries to get the exposure so that the scene is "averagely" bright, which technically is 18% grey. So the polar bear and the black cat come out the same grey colour.

That's what's happening here. The camera doesn't know that your background is supposed to be white, so it's trying to make it 18% grey. You need to tell it that it's supposed to be white - i.e. that you want it "over exposed" compared with grey - and the way you do that is by setting the exposure compensation (EC). Positive EC makes the picture brighter; negative EC makes the picture darker. EV stands for Exposure Value which is the amount of EC you apply. 1 EV is one stop of exposure - like changing the aperture from f/5.6 to f/4, or changing the shutter speed from 1/1000th to 1/500th, or changing fro 100 ISO to 200 ISO.

Your forum profile says you use a Nikon D50. So here's page 47 of the D50 user manual:

upload_2017-12-9_18-0-35.png?
 
Thank you for the trouble you went to Stewart it's very kind of you. It all looks very complicated but I am going to try and get my head around it.
 
Helen123 said:
Thank you for the trouble you went to Stewart it's very kind of you. It all looks very complicated but I am going to try and get my head around it.
Click to expand...

It's really quite easy when you try it. Just push the button marked +/- and move the wheel at the same time until the LCD shows +1.3 or +1.5 and then take your picture again. Just remember to re-set it back to zero afterwards. :)
 
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