Which lens for shooting glass in a lightbox?

[justin-branam]

Im trying to decide which lens i should use to shoot some of my brothers glass works which will be placed on his website. I am trying to decide between the 17-40L, 70-200L, or the 60 prime. Of course im thinking the L's because hey, they are L's, but the 60 is a very sharp lens and gets pretty good color saturation. Any suggestions?

setup will be a lightbox with a 420ex on each side being fired with a 580 (which will not be fired), and possibly a 500 watt halogen from above.

[tim]

I can't really see how the lens will make difference in this situation. Macro lenses are sharp, use that. The only consideration that comes to mind will be depth of field - the longer the lens, the narrower it'll be.

I wouldn't mix flash and halogen lights because of the different color temperatures. If you desaturate the image it won't make any difference. I'm not sure how much of the 500w light you'll be able to see beside two flashes. An alternate idea is to bounce the 580EX off a white ceiling.

I would suggest you read up on bright field and dark field lighting before you shoot glass. The book "light: science and magic" covers the topic well, as well as other difficult lighting scenarios. Google will probably tell you something too.

Just FYI IMHO "corner the pros" is meant to ask questions of a commercial nature, and gets less traffic than some of the other subforums. You'll get more replies if you post to another forum, perhaps talk about photography. For lighting specific topics try the lighting forum. If you put something in the wrong forum just PM a mod to move the topic.