I took a trip to Home Depot this morning to pick up some supplies for my new photography project. Here's a preliminary run down of some results before I even built the light box.

The goods minus the 3/4" schedule 40 PVC. Total at HD was under $130:



The previous high speed 3-light setup with 200w bulbs (totally inneffective BTW since the temp of the bulbs is in the 2000K range:




I took several pictures of an early M1 Garand bolt using a Nikon D40 on auto. I've not touched up any of the shots. The first is of the bolt under the incandescent lighting. While it's not a bad shot, you can see the yellows and the shot just isn't bright."



I then changed out the bulbs in the high-speed 3-light setup and took the picture again using the florescent 100W bulbs at 5500K.

Here's the set-up:



Here's a picture with the hotter bulbs. I could immediately see a difference in the brightness with these bulbs:



Here's a light box set-up I bought at Ritz Camera. It's a nice collapsible box with fabric diffusers and a blue shooting matt (fabric). The problem was the crappy little lights provided that couldn't light a bug. You can see I placed just one of the 10" lights ontop (quickly) to take a picture:



Here's a picture of the bolt with just that one bulb on the top of the box. Not too bad:



Who knows what I might be able to do once I get the lighting down, learn how to use my camera and use a tripod! Thanks again for the tips and advice.