On 10/25/11 10:24 AM, Nick wrote:
I'm trying to get good, consistent, photographs of a VFD display
(single tube) and have having trouble with getting the colours right&
decent detail - this is when the tube is lit (all segments).
Anyone done this with good success and care to share settings/
technique etc.?
Nick
Nick,
I just spent some large amount of time with professional photographers
working with both my Nixie watch and my LED video coat. They took hours
and hundreds of pictures to get a couple good shots. I watched their
methods.
The tube display elements tend to be a lot brighter than the camera's
exposure sensor expects, so you have to use manual exposure setting and
dial it a couple F-stops darker than the meter thinks is correct. Take
test photos and adjust as needed until you're happy with the result.
Once you get the glowing parts correct, then you can start to work on
the background lighting. If you're using manual camera settings, then
the background light changes shouldn't affect the glowing bits' exposure.
Diffused lighting is very helpful to get the background right. That can
be hard to achieve indoors, but it's possible with several lights
pointed at the light-colored room walls and ceiling. Direct lighting is
usually unhelpful. The guy who took photos for PopSci used a light on
each side and one above me, but he had expensive lights with very tight
beam control.
As far as the color goes, blue-green is the most difficult to get right
due to the extremely nonlinear color response of the human eyeball and
the nature of RGB color sensors used in cameras. You'll have to take
several photos with different white balance settings and see which comes
out looking the best. And there's always post-production software
(Photoshop).
--
David Forbes, Tucson AZ
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