In my work I have need to take pictures of objects sitting on a white light box (not a UV light box). When I try to do so with my Android phone's digital camera, these strange orange lines appear on the image of the white light box; these lines are not at all visible to the eye. My colleague also sees the same orange lines through his iPhone's camera, so it seems to me like it must have something to do with the cameras' image sensors. Any idea how to get images without these orange artifacts? Some kind of camera setting or some kind of lens filter, etc? Thanks.
I had the same problem. Until we got a proper gel documentation system in our lab, I photographed the gel on a white background using illumination from a fluorescent light set at an oblique angle to the gel, so as to avoid reflection. It wasn't great, but it was usable.
Adam, that's exactly what I'm doing now since I can't use the white box for photos. However, yesterday I posted this same question on a dedicated photography forum (StackExchange Photo), and I think the real photographers had the answer. Apparently it has to do with the flickering rate of fluorescent lights (around 60 Hz in the US) vs the shutter speed of your camera. They suggested I go to a slow shutter speed such as 1/40 s. I'll be in the lab tomorrow to test it out and will report back how it turned out. We don't have the money in our lab to purchase a sophisticated gel doc system (and we don't really need one, anyway), so I'm hoping that this solves the problem.
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