Black paint vs. flocking pics

Hey, all:

I just finished using Protostar's black flocking paper. I had two coats of flat black paint on, which were about a year old. I used my digital camera, with flash, at a distance of 2-3 ft. from the tube. Same background lighting and nearly the same angle in the before and after pics. I wanted to test how much of a true difference it made. You be the judges.

Guy
tampa,fl

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Here is the Protostar stuff.

The tube is short, as my 12.5 f/6 is a split-sonotube design I made.

A neat way to see the difference is to open a new Internet Explorer window and go to my older message. Then Alt-Tab back and forth. Notice how much reflected light comes off the tube and strikes the secondary and focuser in the original photo.

guy

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Ditto what Tom and Warren said. As an experiment, I made a copy of the "after" photo to try to brighten it to match the before pic more closely. Lo and behold, if you look inside the tube in my brightened picture, the velvet part looks brighter than the old flat black portion further inside!

My guess is that it's the flash that's making it look brighter. The individual velvet fibers are probably somewhat shiny, and you're getting minute but numerous specular reflections off each one, making it look brighter. I would think that such photo comparisons ought to be done outside, out of direct sunlight, and without flash. Guy, any way you can take another shot of it like I described?

Best regards,
Doug

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