DIY Light Box

Today I made a light box to photograph small products. I saw somewhere a similar thing. Can't figure out where though. And I am too lazy to google it now. May be later.

Okay so first I dig out a cardboard box. Taufiq vai ordered something large from Amazon and it fulfilled its life long purpose in my little project. Anyway, I did not measure the dimension of the box, but it is slightly larger than the standard letter size printer papers in all sides.

I held a paper against the side of the box and marked a rectangle slightly smaller than the paper. I did it on three sides of the box- two largest sides and one smaller side. The reason for this is- I can change the lighting by placing the strobe on either largest side or the smaller side. If, in near future, I get another strobe, it will placed on the other largest side. The fourth one is left as it was, which was a mistake I will discuss later in the post.

So here is the box marked using a green marker-

After marking the lines, I used a kitchen knife to cut along the lines. Here is how it looked like-

You can see the fourth uncut side at the bottom. I should have cleared out edges. The stray strips of paper was hampering when I glued the printer papers. So After gluing the papers, the box looks like this-

With my SB25 on the right-

Even at this point, I have not noticed my stupid mistake yet. The mistake was that, every side of the box was covered. So there was nowhere, I would place my camera to take a shot of the product. The fault was found just after I placed the box onto my wrist watch. So after I took out the paper off from one side, the box looks like this-

So now I have a window to shoot from. Yay. Here are the shots of a couple of products I could find on my messy table-

My watch-

A new box of Gillette Mach3 Razor cartridges-

Finished Grid

At last I finished the grid completely. Below you can see the results of the hard(?) work-

Flash at 24mm-

Flash at 85mm-

So I guess I will use 85mm with the grid.

Finished Grid-

DIY Black Straws Grid

Today I finished a DIY Grid for my SB-25. Actually I started it a few days ago. But I ran out of the straws and had to collect more straws. I took help from this site for making this grid. Instead of black straws, I used the thinner straws I found in UTD Student Union coffee corner. These straws are used to stir the coffee. Here is a picture of a piece of a straw used-

I used a Quick Dry Adhesive by 3M for holding all the pieces together. Here is a photo of that one-

The grid itself is not yet finished. After the glue is dried, I shall try to finish it. There is some gaps in the grid that I need to fill. If I can fill the gaps with the available straws, then I will upload another photo of that one. In the mean time here are some other photos of the unfinished grid-

One word of caution, try to build the whole thing in one go. Don't stop at the middle of the process and start again. Because the glue will be dried then and it will hamper the placement of the straws. And also collect as many straws as possible. Don't be shy. In most the places they are free.