I shot these a few years ago on slide film with my old Nikon F3...

They are: Soennecken 222, Parker 65, Omas Celluoid Paragon, MB Proust, Pelikan 1050, and a Parker Imperial Vacumatic.

I need to get some kind of lightbox setup so I can shoot some more. Does anyone have any recommendations for an inexpensive and simple setup?

You can find the same pictures on my Flickr page at flickr.com/photos/anselolson/

Good looking images there. Very nice pens as well.

I have a couple of light setups. One is a tent that has served me pretty well for the last year or so.

The above setup has produced these images below.




I have been futzing around with just beauty dishes with some softening fabric over them, and just tonight got a small slave flash that works with my SB600.



I bought the light tent off of ebay, before I knew better. There is a really nice one for about the same as I paid for the one shown above at BH Photo.

BH Photo Light tent

This light tent is really good enough for professional use, I will probably pick one up at some point soon.

Cheers,
SG

Thanks. I'm not yet sure what makes one tent better than another, but I know like the style of the one you have--it looks like it folds down to store easily, like this one that collapses into a small circle Interfit. Great photos by the way.

Thanks, I like the fold down one as it is more portable, but I usually leave my tent setup on a filing cabinet anyway. I think that the BH one would be more sturdy and probably better material. I find that mine is a bit of a PITA when I want to shoot macro stuff as my new macro lens focuses very closely at 1:1 and the lip at the bottom of the opening can be problematic.

Even though the tent that I have looks big it becomes very small when I am trying to get both hands and a DSLR in there. I have to do lots of cropping to make sure that the edges do not show up in my shots.

Oh yeah, if you have a cat, they like to sleep in light tents if you leave them up. I guess its like a cave to them. Makes for alot of lint brushing and cloning in PS if you don't keep the critters out.

Cheers,
SG

Hey SMG, what's the pen on the left in the pens/case pic?

It is a Mentmore Supreme that I restored for a friend of mine.

Almost looks like a Dani Trio in that shot except for the capband.

Cheers,
SG

Beautiful pictures....you guys are making me think about buying a better camera and a tent..but not for as now (I'm lacking space).
Now, may be a stupid question, but how do you guys get to gather all the photos under the same posting without going to an URL?
Thanks!

When you insert pictures into the posting, I usually hit the IMG button at the top of the page where you compose your reply. I use Normal mode and just hit enter between images.

you end up with something that looks like
{IMG}http:\picture name here from your image hosting page{IMG}
{IMG}http:\second picture name here from your image hosting page{IMG}

The only difference is that the { } would be replaced by [ ] and your actual image address would be between the IMG tags.

I use photobucket as a hosting page and now all I have to do is click on the IMG button here, click once on the http button, below the image I want to post on my photobucket page, and paste it into the IMG window that is here on FPN. For ease of use I usually have 2 web browsers running, one here on FPN and the other on Photobucket.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
SG

Nice shots of some amazing pens, perstylo ---thank you for sharing with us!
Thanks for the photo tips, SMG and for posting some sample photos---I can only aspire to take such great shots...

Maja, thanks. I think the imperial vac is my favorite of that group, but I never use it becuase it would be too difficult to replace if something happened to do it. The Soennecken has a great flex oblique italic nib that I use for Christmas Cards and stuff like that. The Omas gets used pretty regularly. The Proust usually only gets inked when the tux comes out. I wish I used the Pelikan more often, but most of the times I go to use a different pen it gets beat out by something else.

BTW, what kind of dog is your avatar?

I would recomment the light tent that I linked to in my original image. If this one is a little steep then you can easily pick one up on ebay for much less. I would go at least a 24"x24" if you can swing it, as the more room the better.

Lights, I would see if you can get something relatively bright, that you can put on stands. I use a large twisty 45W fluorescent bulb. It is daylight balanced which helps with the white balance, but there are other ways around this. I clip my lights to the side of the tent, but have found stands and a slave flash to give better results.

You can also check with Dan Kirchheimer(sp?) for lights and Ron Zorn for tents. They both offer pro level kit but the prices are also a bit more than what you can get off of ebay.

Cheers,
SG

BTW the images in my first post were taken with either my Nikon D50 or my Canon S2IS (the Parker 15 nib was from the Canon).