Meet Puff! He’s my work-in-progress friend who agreed to be the star of my mini photo shoot tests, but more on that later.
I just want to start off with the fact that I am an absolutely terrible photographer. You’ve probably picked up on that from the sub-par photos I use in this blog – sorry! Still, I’ve always loved and admired clean, simple photography styles. Through Google, I’ve learned that lighting is absolutely key for taking nice photos, and that’s what inspired me to try and make a light box this week!
This was a very simple project, and cheap too! The only things to buy were white tissue paper and poster board, and I’m assuming some of you guys might have that stuff handy. One unintentional modification that I had to make was that there was no white poster board at the dollar store. Instead, I used some gold and silver double-sided wrapping paper from Hallmark to line the inside of the box for now. I think this was a less than ideal substitution as the wrapping paper isn’t as matte as poster board, and light can reflect in strange ways.
Like I said earlier, I did some test shots with my little amigurumi friend, Puff. He’s going to be a dragon some day when he grows up and gets finished, but for now, he’s a happy little head. In the photo at the top, the three variations have differing amounts of light, and you can see the change it makes.
- (left) Right lamp on
- (centre) Two lamps on
- (right) Left lamp on
All in all, I’m still really happy with the way this turned out. The idea of a lightbox is to be able to control the diffusion of light on a subject, so now that I have one, hopefully you’ll see an improvement in my photos! Let me know if you have any other photography tips!