Yesterday I received my China made photo studio set consisting of a white backdrop, two softboxes incl. 5500K bulbs and a set of light reflectors. The quality is not bad for the price paid. Not bad at all. From now on, I’ll use this set for all my eBay photos. As a matter of fact, I already did shoot a few photos of my Bass ukulele (which I will put up for auction on eBay very soon, BTW) and the photos came out really nice. Yeah, I know – I should’ve ironed the backdrop, but honestly – I can’t be bothered right now. Perhaps I’ll do it later… Check out my photo/video studio setup on the pic below.
And here’s one of the ukulele photos. Whaddaya say? Looking good, ha? Oh, and yes, that is indeed the original B-Band pickup/preamp system. Yeah, baby. And Aquila Thundergut strings. Believe me, this little uke sounds like an upright bass when amplified. I’ll hate to see it leave my collection, but… New life, remember?
After this initiall photo success I decided that it was time to follow up on the old idea of doing a video blog. Casey Neistat style. And so I did a first test-run. Recorded a few takes with different settings, just to see what gives. Yeah, right. Video blog my a$$. It was a total disaster. Fail. My voice sounded awful (as in: totally horrible) and I was moving around as if I was suffering from a really bad case of a hyperactivity disorder.
Apart from the actual video being less than optimal (due to my… ahm… appearance and voice quality), I have to say that, from the technical perspective, this home-recording-video-studio setup was really well made. Two softboxes, one on each side of the room provided beautiful lighting. I attached a Røde microphone for studio-grade sound quality. I even used my MacBook as a monitor, to see myself while recording (I found this tip on YouTube: Frame Yourself with iPhone’s Back Camera). Being able to see the resulting video while recording is, of course, a cool feature. The problem is that – one tends to look at the monitor all the time, instead of looking straight at the camera lens. That’s why I came up with this little sticker-reminder saying “<- Look here!” (a trully revolutionary idea. Wonderful solution. Every video blogger novice should be using this! :-).
Oh, well… I guess everything requires practice. That old martial arts proverb “train for a 1000 days and you’re still a beginner; train 10,000 days and you are a master” is so true. Now I have just 9,999 days to go. Master photographer, here I come! How many years was that again?
So, folks – don’t expect to see any videos in this blog for the time being. It’s just too embarrassing. If I manage to brush up on my voice with some compression and EQ to a decent level, I’ll dare to upload a video in the future… Or maybe I’ll just upload a few videos and let you choose. How about that?