Light Box

For quite some time I wanted some kind of setup for taking better pictures of things, bigger or smaller everyday objects. So I built one to my storage. I had some extra pieces of wood, a white desk that I was no longer using, various excess parts from Ikea furniture, small hooks, etc.

I wanted to use the old desk top as a background, and for attaching colored background papers to it. Attaching it to the wall was not going to work since the wall frames and studs were not for anchoring the table quite where I wanted to put it. Plus I wanted it to be easy to disassemble. It wedged nicely behind the workbench but, was way too low. I used three pieces of wood and a cross support from an Ikea Gorm storage shelf for a simple support frame to get the table top a good 60 centimeters off the floor:

Here is a close up of the support frame, with some metal clips on the sides to prevent the table top from moving sideways:

To get some feel of how it all might work, I attached a spare shower curtain to the ceiling and took some test pictures. Besides the little flash on the camera, I had one separate flash and a halogen site light that got really hot and was way too yellow. That aside, things seemed going to the right direction. Here the uplifted table top is on the left:

Ugly and inconvenient as it was, I planned ahead. For one thing, the shower curtain was so not going to stay there:

For a and decent perfectly white backdrop I bought a roll of printing paper. This is nearly 1 meter wide and there's no less than 43 meters of it:

So that had to be attached to something. Anything resembling a 25 millimeter pipe seemed working. This one is from an old laundry rack. But then I found a nice 120 cm long chrome steel tube. That was just the right length as the studs behind the wall boards are that much apart. I bought a couple of strong hooks and attached them to the wall studs.

For the sides I used 110 cm of 60 cm wide drawing plastic. That seems good material for it lets most of the light through, but scatters a lot, making just about any lamp soft and even. I glued two pieces of lath to the ends, for hanging them from the ceiling and for keeping them straight. I then taped a piece of white paper to the ceiling for bouncing off a flash of it.

Here's the completed setup. The sides come off easily and the background paper can be rolled back up or taken out and cut if it gets dirty:

To avoid the thing burning up, I bought a cheap LED site light to light the background. And for some nice highlights I found a simple clip-on reading lamp. Putting a good LED lamp into it made it rather useful.

The whole thing being nearly 1 cubic meter in size, though not quite that deep, I can photograph quite big objects it. Here's a warehouse dolly; I left the background just a bit off-white to show how evenly lit it is:

...and from the smaller end of the scale:

More test shots... a toy car, about 20 cm long:

Headphones, for checking out the black tones:

...and some color:

Transparent objects... I need some practice with this. Turning off all but the background light seems working much better than the regular setup used here:

And then some shiny things. For this I installed the white shower curtain behind the camera to avoid the reflections getting to interesting. Could be interesting to try out some colored backdrops for the reflections.

If the background can be white, it can also be black. With the two shots it is easy to do background removal, even with transparent objects. Here's something on white:

...and the same thing on a black background:

The difference of the two can be then used as a mask to get rid of the background completely:

And that's that. Now to take some pictures...