Hello Methos
Glad I could help some. There is so much more you can do and learn now as opposed to decades ago when you shot a few rolls made mistakes, read a book and tried again over weeks or months. Now it's almost instantaneous. You shoot something look at it on the lcd to see if you got the focus and exposure right, load it on the computer and post it to ask for suggestions in a matter of hours, it's great. As to your questions the daylight bulbs give a fairly good spectrum of light, good enough for most purposes. I like tabletop photography and have a bank of of 4 double 4 ft lights with daylight balanced bulbs plus various other compact daylight bulbs and reflectors. The 4 ft shop fixtures ( which come with chains to hang them and a cord ) go on sale every few months and I picked them up for about $15 plus the bulbs you're looking at maybe $20 or so each. I have them fastened together on a pulley system hung from the basement joists so I can raise or lower it a couple of feet as needed. A lot of the stuff I use I've bought cheap or modified or made. Certainly nothing fancy but works for my purposes. I've posted a couple of photos here.
lights 2a | Flickr - Photo Sharing! As for the color balance if you put a grey card or a white piece of paper and set your custom white balance off of that it will be accurate. I always strongly encourage people to shoot in RAW or if they aren't comfortable with that shoot RAW + jpeg. That way you the jpeg for quick work but have the RAW file which has all the sensor data. With RAW you can easily correct color balance etc. and it isn't hard. Also you may get a once in lifetime shot and you won't have to regret that you were only shooting jpeg. As for filling up the hard drive, memory is cheap and once you load them on the computer you go through and cull the obvious rejects anyway. I have a light tent that I picked up for $20 on sale. They aren't really necessary if you are shooting non reflective items. For highly reflective items, glass, silver and such then they can be helpful. Like I posted earlier you can make your own if you are halfway handy with ideas someone has already worked out or take it as a jumping off point and modify it to suit your needs. Getting back to photographing your wife's bears. If you are selling them online I would say accurate color is vital, as someone is buying it based on what you are putting up on line. If the color is warmer or cooler than it actually is they may not like what they get so it's best to be spot on. There is enough variations in color representation with uncalibrated monitors as it is, best to start off as accurately as possible. The lack of DOF is something that can be rectified when you get a tripod. It will allow you to shoot with longer shutters speeds and smaller apertures to get greater DOF. ( As another aside if you can't afford a good one pick up a used one cheap to start with, rather than buying a series of cheap ones. You end up spending more upgrading the cheap ones than you would have buying a good one to start with. If you have a local online sales place you can pick up one at good savings. Here where I live it's KIJIJI,it's free site to put things up for sale and people are always selling off camera equipment and such. Like I said you can make or make do with items you have or pick up cheap. The table in the photo is a piece of plywood with metal fold up legs I got for free. If you don't have multiple lights some reflectors will help bounce light back on your subject. Either store bought reflectors or crumpled tin foil on some cardboard. Enough of a ramble for now my wife says supper is ready.
Cheers
Greg
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