I recently bought a Canon R3 and I really like it.
As I have a lot of small stuff I’d like to take pictures of indoors, doing this right meant getting a somewhat decent lighting setup.
Below is a picture of that setup in its infancy, using a pretty affordable 3-light (CFL) softbox kit from Impact and a canvas backdrop from Westcott. I still want to get a different background support and will probably end up using basic background paper instead for some things.
As shown above by the inclusion of the frog, I am now apparently a very serious professional. (The white box is a dehumidifier). With the three lights, there’s enough light here to hand hold all the shots I want to take with the R3 and lens stabilization turned on and allowing higher ISOs. The R3’s noise response is as advertised — very good, but wouldn’t want more noise either. Anyway, my point is this: no need for strobes.
As a demo of something other than the very helpful frog, here’s some close up shots of some 8” Four Horsemen figures using the Canon 100mm f/2.8 L macro:
And another one…
It turns out the autofocus on the R3 is extremely impressive, and it is amusing to me that it locks onto the eyes of alien action figures as well as people and animals. I have reduced the noise in Lightroom some, as this is probably about f/8?
Here is the same alien a lot closer, where the head is a little over an inch tall:
I have quite a bunch of other things I want to shoot so I’ll probably be sharing a lot more of this in the “photography” category of this blog/newsletter/whatever. I will also have some online galleries (home.laserllama.net) to share later. There will be lots of toys but also rocks. You can unsubscribe from only certain category “tags” on this blog anytime if it gets to be too much.
Also, that webpage does have a contact form if anybody ever wants to use it - though I think you can usually reply to substack emails also.
More to come!