My museum job offers me unique opportunities in video and photography. I don't know anyone else who is asked to set up a photo shoot to capture images of fossils for a colleague's upcoming presentation. Initially, I was just going to use my Nikon 3400 DSLR to take some simple shots, but at the last minute, I remembered I had been gifted a previously used white box and wanted to give it a go!
Truthfully, I had never practiced with a white box before, but I had seen it used by a better photographer than me so I knew what it could do. I set up the box, arranged two lights I had on either side as a key light and a fill light, attached my speedlite (set to TTL), and...just started shooting. Since I didn't have a lot of time to practice metering, I did what photographers are always told NOT to do and used auto mode. It seemed like the fastest and most effective way to get the shots we needed.
For my first attempt at using a white box, I was pretty happy with the results! My lighting probably wasn't the best, I chickened out and abandoned manual mode, and I'm sure there are still things I need to understand about the box, itself, but I was able to achieve high resolution photographs that were in focus and could have the box background removed and replaced with a cleaner black background in Adobe Photoshop. I'd like to learn more about Product Photography because this is a skill I could use more of in my day job.