A Light Box

On Saturday I built a light box using the instructions on the Strobist Blog. It turned out really well, as you can see! It turns out I had all the bits and pieces at home already, so I sat down with a cardboard box, three sheets of tracing paper, some tape, a box cutter, and some poster board, and in about ten minutes I had a light box for small studio work.

It's not the end-all be-all of studio lighting solutions, but it's actually pretty darned good for what it does. For example, there's not much provision for cutting down on the light at the back of the scoop (a fade-to-black technique that makes the subject look like it's standing on an infinitely large flat plane), but you really can control the light well by shadowing each of the side panels with other pieces of poster board, or by turning the box so the ambient light strikes it differently.

I also found out you can get highlights on reflective objects by bringing a small point source close to one of the side panels on the box. I used an LED flashlight, but a small incandescent flashlight would work as well, and would offer better color matching for shots done indoors using tungsten lights.

The instructions do mention that you don't really need to use strobes to make the thing work. Ambient works great, especially with black and white (which doesn't care as much about light color) or digital (where you can white-balance out nearly any lighting situation). So far I haven't used a strobe with my box, and don't really plan to. It works great just the way it is.

If you do product photography for a place like Etsy, or if you run your own site and need to photograph your wares, this really is an inexpensive alternative to some otherwise hideously expensive approaches. I took this picture with a digital SLR, but it would've worked just as well for a point and shoot with some marginal macro capabilities an some sort of stabilization (tripod, beanbag, chair back, or just a really steady hand.) It works!

Tom