Cheap Lightbox, Crappy Camera Style

I was out and about yesterday (or, as they say in my native land, oot and aboot) and found my way into a local Goodwill. Goodwill's are great places to find all sorts of fantastic things. Last year I found two awesome clown paintings that I was able to modify with some Arduino's into interactive Halloween Clown paintings. Over the last few months I've found dozens upon dozens of 78rpm records. Yesterday I found this great little Nikon Coolpix for a grand sum of $3.99.

Interestingly, the next stop on my path was a dollar store, and it got me thinking how neat it would be to build a photography studio/photo tent set up with only ancient crappy cameras and dollar store goods. I know had a project!

At the dollar store I picked up a trifold to act as a cheap photo base and some sparkled tissue for an infinite background drop. For props I gathered some small faerie type figurines.

I had five "crappy cameras" to choose from, with "crappy" defined as an old digital camera with a 3 mega-pixel or less digital sensor. Unfortunately a series of mishaps quickly reduced the list to three: the new Coolpix that I just picked up, my favourite floppy disk based Sony FD Mavica, and my original generic 2 mega-pixel crappy camera. Alas, I then discovered that I do not currently have an SD card old enough/small enough to be read by the generic camera, so I was down to two, my new Nikon and the Sony:

Photography is all about lighting, so I set up a series of lights around the table I was working on. Without using a tripod (they didn't have one at the dollar store) I did my best to take photos from the same angle with both of the cameras. What I discovered is about exactly what I expected: the Sony FD provides a far more grainy picture than the Coolpix but, with some gentle post-processing, both cameras produced some nice images.

Sony FD Mavica pictures

*Nikon Coolpix pictures

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(c) All images and photographs, unless otherwise specified, are created and owned by me.
(c) Victor Wiebe

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About Me

Amateur photographer. Wannabe author. Game designer. Nerd. 
General all around problem-solver and creative type.

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