New camera review - the Canon SX10

[spuddevans]

Tim,
One thing to consider when making your ring light is the angle of illumination, sometimes specified as the viewing angle, of the LEDs. The LEDs you linked to do not specify what the angle is.

I suggest that you drill the holes in your plate at an angle so the LEDs point to a good average tool length distance for your setup. If you have a rotary table that you can tilt, or that you can mount at an angle, then it should be fairly easy. The angle you choose will be dependent on your own work setup.

I have thought that that would be the case, and I think that your solution with tilting the rotary table will work just great. I also would like to mount a couple of "straight line" laser's to the assembly as well to give a composite cross-hair indication of centre. Obviously the mounts for the lasers wll need to be adjustable.

Thanks for giving me a solution for drilling the led holes.

Tim

 

[shred]

FWIW most cameras (and I'm almost positive the Canon) have a manual white-balance setting. That's good for model pictures because often the things we take pictures of are nothing like what the auto white-balancer is looking for, so it throws them off.

Manual white balance is easy to use too-- take a white sheet of paper (any old white paper is good for these purposes, you don't need some special extra-white photo card) and lay it down by the model. Hit the Manual WB setting, point the camera at the paper and give the shutter a half-press or whatever it takes to record the balance. Then take the model shots.

 

[GailInNM]

Thank you Shred.
This camera does have such a feature. My old camera did not. I was only up to about page 100 in the book on the camera and the custom white balance is not described for about another 40 pages. Since I did not know it was there I had not gone looking for it. I learn, but slowly.
Gail in NM,USA