Check out the new lights we have in the shop…

Sorry if this is a bit of a boring post, but it should have a pretty big impact on the photos we have here in the blog.  When we moved into the shop last year, it was outfitted with some super cheap florescent light bulbs.  These bulbs were a problem for a couple of reasons.  The biggest problem was cheap florescent bulbs make paint correction (wetsanding and polishing) extremely difficult.  If you’ve ever seen a high end detailer work on a car, often he’ll use a “sun gun” on spots to replicate daylight as florescent lights can trick your eyes and not show some imperfections and exaggerate others.

I’d have to polish a piece and step outside in natural light to see the what the piece looked like in daylight to catch all the imperfections.  Obviously this meant I could only polish during certain hours and took up quite a bit of extra time stepping in and out of the shop to eyeball the pieces.

The other problem was the photos I took for the blog.

Under the old bulbs, no matter what settings I used on the camera, they always turned up with an ugly yellow hue.  I’d have to adjust the colors in Photoshop.  This meant a lot of the time the colors in the photos weren’t always fully accurate.  We’d also get some weird reflection lines and some haziness that can’t be seen on the pieces in person.

These next two are completely untouched (they are resized and watermarked) photos of the same pieces under the new bulbs.  As you can see there is a drastic difference in the end result.  Now I just need to get a decent camera so I can start taking better photos.