How can I take better photos?

[les-smith]

Here are a few photos that I took. The one thing that I do not like is the yelowish background. I read through the camera book and played around with it a lot yesterday, but this is what I got. These were with no flash. When I use the flash I get the background clear/whitish which is what I like, but the pen gets washed out. My set up is using three lights, they are the GE Edison Halogens lights. The set-up photo shows a black background, but the photos were taken using the black to white photo gradient. Any thoughts would be great. Thanks, Les.

 

[TBone]

In my humble non-photographer opinion, it looks as though you need to adjust you white balance. I think your camera is set to daylight and you are using halogen bulbs. My camera has a specific setting for halogen lights, accessible when I use manual settings. HTH

 

[TellicoTurning]

I can't help you.. I have such a lousy camera it takes bad pictures just to spite me... it never ever sees the picture the same way I do.

 

[toolcrazy]

You might consider setting up some sort of light box to defuse the light.

 

[dbriski]

Definitly a white balance issue. If your camera has the capability to set preset the white balance, that would be the best. Find out how to do it on your camera then put a sheet of white paper in your photo field and have the camera set it off of this paper. This is basicly telling you camera, this is what white should look like and it adjusts the color mapping accordingly as it processes the pictures. This is normally on more of an upper middle level camera, the cheaper ones will only have presets which you may have to test to find out which works best in your lighting situation.

 

[txcwboy]

I have a light tent.2 lights (6500k fluorescents) switched to a 8x11 sheet of paper with the lights straight over the subject and works really good. No tent needed !

Dave

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[stevers]

I agree with the white ballance.