Friday, March 02, 2007

DIY Soft Light Tent

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Well, I was on my Spring Break last week (Woooo Spring Break!!!) ...Not quite. I had a little over a week off from school, and had absolutely nothing to do on it. I was in Shaunavon for a few days, but other than that, I didn't do a thing. I don't know many people here in the city, and the ones I do were either on holidays, or had gone back home. Unfortunately for me, my home is the city...so I was SOL.

I was bored to say the least. However, I tried to keep busy...

I was doing my daily morning web rounds (Digg, Engadget, Etc) and I came across a tutorial on how to build your own light box for under $15 on Digg. A light box is just a box used to diffuse light on a object to take a macro picture of it without casting a shadow. Now I thought that was pretty cool...but then thought "Screw $15...I can do this for free" And so my day project began.

The only reason my light box was free was because I made it with stuff around the house that I could dig up.

For my FREE light tent I used the following materials:
  • - A Tropicana orange juice box
  • - White translucent fabric. I used a pillow case I found in the laundry room. HEHE...Shhh!
  • - White paper
  • - Exacto Knife
  • - Tape/scissors/ruler
  • - Lamps with a bulb with a full light spectrum(White light). I used lamps with halogen bulbs.
  • - White primer paint. (I used paint instead of lining the whole box in paper. Paint was faster so...
It turned out pretty well actually. The pillow case fabric doesn't work as well as I thought it would. It put too much of a orangish tint to the light, which I was trying to eliminate. However if you mess around with aperture and F-stop a bit you can make it a little better. Overall I was pretty impressed with my project. It kept me busy, and I had a fun making it.

Here are some shots taken of and inside my homemade soft light tent. :)







(Mitch edited this pictures for me. This is the look I was initially trying to get from the light box.)

2 comments:

Mitch said...

Oh man... That took me way too fucking long to figure out what you were doing this for. I thought you made some fucking enviro-friendly lamp or some shit. That's pretty cool man. I was talking with my Mom about how I wanted a white room for pictures. I decided on making a rig with a pull down blind (like in the bedrooms at my house) This would work well for small objects.

A little Photoshop touch up on those images you would have a truer white. Nice work!

Anonymous said...

Well said.