Custom Granda Lava Lite - Yellow/Red

This is the 2nd run. So far, so good! This is as close to the real colors as I could get. It's an incredibly hard lamp to photograph accurately.

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Comment by Peter Panussi on September 22, 2017 at 2:02pm: Thank you for these tips!

An external flash pointed straight up, that sounds very promising, I have to check that out (my girlfriends dad just died some months ago and he had lots of photographic stuff, I'm gonna look if there is an external flash I could get)

Comment by Erin on September 22, 2017 at 12:58pm: I use Adobe Lightroom to edit my photos. I shoot in RAW format, bring them into Lightroom, tweak (lots of tweaks) and then export to JPEG. I use a Canon DSLR (nothing fancy) and a cheap external flash that is mounted on top of my Canon. I've taken a few photography classes over the years, but I've come to learn a LOT is done in post processing. I'll post my before and after in Lightroom so you can see that the photo isn't Photoshopped per se, but rather just had many of the values changed.

I also bounce my external flash off the ceiling (it's pointed straight up). It adds much-needed light, but won't cause reflections in the glass. I had my overhead bedroom light on, too.

I'll share my settings, too, but I think it was 400 ISO, auto white balance (so easy to tweak afterwards in Lightroom), and somewhere around 3 - 5.6 aperture. Shutter speed was maybe 1/200. I just keep trying all the combinations until I get the lighting I like; I adjust aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focus points, etc. Bump the flash up/down... keep playing with it!

Comment by Peter Panussi on September 22, 2017 at 12:19pm: @erin: do you postproduct your pictures with photoshop, or how do you make these phantastic photos?

I always become desperate when trying to catch the beautifulness of my lamp's colors.
Flashlight changes the colors and causes ugly reflections on the glass, without flash it's often too dark.

Extremely difficult are ensembles with lamps with different lava colors like darb blue and light orange: Either the blue is perfect but the orange only a blazing light-flash, or the orange is ok but the blue only a black hole...

Do you have any special tricks to illuminate the scene? An indirect source of light?

Any advice highly welcome :-)

Comment by Michael on September 22, 2017 at 11:20am: This makes me want to get a yellow/red globe solely for the purpose of putting it on my 50th anniversary base!

Comment by Michael on September 22, 2017 at 11:19am: Amazing! Beautiful photography as always, Erin! :)

Comment by kero48 on September 22, 2017 at 10:22am: Looks really good, photo has great colors!!

Comment by Erin on September 22, 2017 at 7:21am: Thanks everyone. :) I love photography and lava lamps are a big challenge for me to get right.

Comment by Peter Panussi on September 22, 2017 at 4:57am: Wow, looks very good! And I know how complicated it is to make a suitable photo with realistic colors...

Comment by Tim on September 22, 2017 at 4:38am: Looks AWESOME!!!! Cant wait to get mine!

Comment by Erin on September 21, 2017 at 9:04pm: I so wish they'd use real pictures of their lamps! I hate those stupid renderings they always use. I guess most people don't care.