Metal Pill Box

[Mike Buckley]

A longtime friend returning from travel gave this metal box to my wife. She uses it as a pill box. It stays on our dining room table to remind her to take a calcium pill with our evening meal.

Setup
The tabletop is glossy black acrylic. A medium continuous-light lamp on the left lights that side. Another one on the front right lights the front. A small continuous-light lamp suspended above lights the top. A reflector behind the subject lights the unpainted far right edge of the top beside the the green strip, which, otherwise, would have been as dark as the background.

[Shadowman]

Nicely captured, perhaps a bit more elevation of the camera above the lid.

[Tony Britton]

Great shot. I especially enjoy images featuring black backgrounds!

Tony
http://tonybrittonphotography.zenfolio.com/

[mknittle]

That is a really nice subject.

[Manfred M]

Great image (I might have said that before...), but I tend to agree with John. The crop seems just a bit tight.

[Mike Buckley]

Thank you, everyone!

[bnnrcn]

A beautiful box Mike Considering that it is a pill box , did you use a macro lens to get such a big image of the small box? I just wonder if a vertical frame would suit such an image more

[Mike Buckley]

Great question, Binnur. I used a 35mm lens. One reason I use that lens almost exclusively for my tabletop photography is that it allows me to focus so closely, allowing for larger magnifications of small subjects photographed in my tiny makeshift studio than would be possible using a standard (non-macro) lens that doesn't focus so closely. The minimum focusing distance is less than 10" (about 25 cm). As an example, though I cropped the image to slightly change the composition and more importantly to limit the amount of negative space on the left and right sides, my crop didn't alter the display size of the subject itself.

If I had used a macro lens in one of the standard focal lengths, I probably would have had to have used focus-stacking to keep the entire subject in focus. (I made this image using only one capture.) On the other hand, a macro lens probably would have made it possible to eliminate the perspective distortion. In this image, I used Lightroom to minimize the perspective distortion but was not able to eliminate it without noticeably distorting the overall shape of the subject.

You mentioned the possibility of using a vertical orientation. As I was setting up the scene, I thought a square format would be most likely. Once I began finalizing the image by deciding upon the crop, I decided upon the horizontal format because it was the only format that felt comfortable to me, especially with regard to the use of negative space.