Lighting Building a lightbox!

Great project. Can you give the dimensions that you used for the parts and the windows?

Bobby

 

np. Thank you for the info. I am putting one together based on that now.

 

this is really helpful thank you~~ :3

 

Thank you so much, I did this yesterday! Well, the sides and top - what did you use for the back/bottom? I bought several extra pieces of foam core board for building backdrops but I'd like to do something seamless like yours too.

 

That helps a lot. I bought some rolls of solid color wrapping paper that might work the same way - I had thought about putting them on a board but it makes so much more sense to do what you did! I have to get some cheaper paper though, I just know I'm going to rip it.

 

That is very help!Thank you!!

 

It is very interesting, thank you!

 

Oh my gosh, I'd been puzzling over what to use for the frame of a collapsable light box for my large doll photos, but we have tons of foam core around here. This tutorial also solves some of my problems with a frame for a soft box for my lights as well as what kind of board to use for making a room background. Just all the solutions here, I don't know why I didn't come here sooner!

 

I have always wanted to make something like this but I always thought it would take too much time. This is so much helpful, thank you!

 

Wow, thanks for this nice tutorial. Will get around to building something like this soon - I just have to gather the necessary supplies, as well as read up on how to take nice BJD pictures.

 

MANY thanks for this- I am always disappointed with my photos- this will help.

 

This is great and very helpfull, thank you!

 

Thanks for tutorial !! I will so try to do this when i start listing my wigs on etsy

 

how very handy! Thank you for sharing!

 

Thanks for sharing this tutorial! I saw one at the last doll meetup I attended, and want to make one so this is great to know

 

Looks really great. Would love to see how other people's turn out/any improvement in photo quality using it, as it seems it would be useful to photograph other stuff than BJDs, like jewellery etc.

 

It is easy to make but useful, thank you!

 

I just built one last night and while it took longer than I expected and looks jankier than the one in the tutorial, it actually works quite well! Thanks for the great tutorial!

 

This is very interesting ! Thanks for sharing!

 

Before making a light box, anyone considering it should first take a look at the typical results and see if it's really the look they are after. My guess is that it's most often not. I'm not hating on light boxes, they are great for certain kinds of work, but they are creatively limiting by design, intentionally, for the purposes explained below.

In commercial product photography, their application is for when you have a large number of items to photograph assembly-line style for an e-commerce site or catalog. Their main advantages are: no setup time, consistent lighting on every item, repeatability for when you need to add more items to an existing catalog and you don't want them to look differently lit from the products shot at and earlier session, and minimum post-processing time (typically only basic, batch operations on all items). The compromise is of course that you don't have lighting that's optimized to make each product look its best. When products are shot individually for advertisements, discrete, custom lighting setups are used, just as is done for portraiture, and many hours of post-processing go into the final images.

If you sell a lot of dolls, a light box is a wonderful tool for doing the for-sale photos, because the flat, diffuse lighting doesn't make hard shadows that people sometimes mistake for discoloration, cracks, etc., and it's very easy to set up. There are commercially-made "popup" light tents available that function just like folding laundry baskets, easily folding flat for storage. This is what I use now, because the foam core and vellum ones I've made in the past were more work to set up and break down, and the all ultimately ended up warping from humidity over time.

If your goal is more artistic, portraiture type shots, you're going to have more flexibility with just a basic sweep backdrop (paper or fabric) and a couple of lights on stands. There is still plenty of opportunity for DIY here, in making diffusors and light modifiers. In fact, if you've already made a foam core light box and it's not getting you the lighting or variety you desire, you can break it apart and use the side panels--assuming they are translucent--as positionable diffusion screens! The materials can also be re-used; if you have vellum or rip-stop material, you can just tape it over the open side of a small cardboard box (amazon and medium flat rate boxes are ideal size) and you have a DIY softbox. You would either put a camera flash inside, or cut a hole in the side of the box opposite the diffusion screen to shine a light in. Just not halogen lights unless you want a fire.