My cousin Cassie asked me to about photographing stuff for eBay, so I looked at a couple of lighting kits on the web. The Photoflex LiteIgloo seems to be the best for someone who wants to get decent photographs of small to medium (breadbox) size objects for eBay listings.
It’s relatively inexpensive, compared to what a professional photographer would spend in a commercial studio. It comes with white and blue (for chromakey) sweep backgrounds, to give you that “floating” image without any extraneous background.
I’ve used Photoflex reflectors and softboxes – they are used by many commercial photographers. The reflectors have a spring steel frame that allows them to collapse and pack to smaller sizes – this seems to be the same design the LiteIgloo uses.
Photoflex has very good instructions and a tutorial on using the LiteIgloo.
If you are going to use your Coolpix 4500, you’ll need to use lights that are mounted off the camera. The easiest thing would to be to buy the LiteIgloo Product Kit if the 19x19x19 size is large enough for your use.
Don’t use a skinny extension cord to plug in this setup, it will overheat. You would probably get better results setting the color balance to Incandescent: Shooting Menu – White Balance – Incandescent.
You can try positioning the single light above and to the left or right of the camera. See the above tutorial for more suggestions and to understand why it gets complicated.