DIY Light Box

Yesterday I decided to DIY one light box for my product shooting purposes... The benefit of a light box is to reduce shadow thus making the product much nicer... Other than that, I can setup my flash gun to fire it either from the side or on top of my product depending on the effect that I want... It is very straight forward and in my opinion it is one of the easier DIY available... What you need is some very basic stationary and it only takes around 30 minutes of your time...

These are the stationary that you need in order to make the light box...

Glue...

4 pieces of cardboard... I choose those with black on one side and white on the other... These will be the main structure of your light box... 1 piece for left and another piece for right, 1 piece for the back and finally the last piece will be the base...

1 piece of drawing paper... This will be your back drop... You can choose whatever colour that you like even those with patterns that you find interesting...

3 pieces of tracing paper... These paper will be acting as a diffuser...

Firstly what you need to do is cut out the center just like in the picture above... But make sure you save some space for you to glue the pieces together in order to form a box...

Once you manage to cut out the center, take the tracing paper and glue it onto the cardboard so that the tracing paper is now covering the area that you just cut out...

Viola... This is the finish product... As you can see from the picture, the light box is not cover on top... By doing so, I can take my picture from the top as well as from the front... More versatile in my opinion... I set up my flash gun to wireless mode and mount it onto my tripod... Time to go shooting...

See my flash gun firing from the side???

This is the result of shooting a product using a light box... Very little shadow and the all white background looks more professional and it will draw peoples attention straight to your subject... People will not get distracted by the background...

This picture is taken by placing the flash gun on the side...

This is taken by placing the flash gun on top of the subject... Can you see the difference between these two pictures??? Quite obvious right...

As a conclusion, I think a light box is a must for those that likes to do product shooting... The difference between shooting with and without a light box is very significant... It only takes you 30 minutes to an hour max to do... The best part is, it only cost me RM9.00 for this... In my opinion, money well spent I must say!!!