Being the generous boyfriend he is, Vince has given me his cold. Right on a weekend. The rain I was complaining about a couple of weeks ago has since vanished into a cloudless sky, the gorgeous 33°S sun pouring over Sydney, warming the chilly winter air to a very pleasant 20ish degrees C. But we’ve got colds. Smeg it.

As a result, we haven’t felt like doing much this weekend. We managed a couple of trips to the shops and back, but nothing to write home about (or blog about?!). As such, indoor persuits has been on the menu. I, ashamedly, have restarted my subscription to World of Warcraft, more out of interest to see if it works than anything, and Vince has been enjoying a mixture of Left for Dead, Splinter Cell and Battlefield.

I have also been making a few more beaded thing for my Etsy shop too though, and today I got around to constructing a sort of lightbox to photograph them in. It’s a bit shoddy and cheap as, but it does the trick and costs only a few bucks. If you want to build your own Shoddy Lightbox™, follow these simple steps!

DIY Lightbox

You will need:

• Tape
• Stanley knife
• Steel rule
• 3x A3 sheets of tracing paper
• 1x A3 sheet of layout paper
• A box!

Since my spare room is currently doubling as a cardboard box graveyard at the moment, I wanted to use a box I already had kicking around. Ideally I would have liked to use a squarer box than the one pictured, so that the panels are all at similar distances to the items I am photographing, but it’s not completely important. Just make sure the box it at least big enough to put your items in and shoot, without getting edges in the shot.

Because I was using A3 size paper, my box’s largest sides had to be at most the size of the paper. If you need a larger lightbox swap out the A3 for more suitable sized sheets. Please note though that due to the shoddy nature of this box, large sized boxes might have some issues with stability!

Using your steel rule as a guide, start cutting out the faces of your box. You will need to leave a 1-3 cm edge as you need something to fix the tracing paper to, and the box needs to maintain as much of its stability as possible.

Work out which face of your box will be the back; you don’t need to cut this face out.

Cut your tracing paper to size to cover the two sides and the top of your box. You don’t need to cover the bottom, as leaving it open means you can photograph your items on any surface you like (see the blue mushroom photo below, where the box was just sat on top of a map to get a different background). Shoddy Lightbox is thrifty and versatile!

Cut your layout paper to match the inside width of your lightbox. Position it inside so that it forms a nice curve at the back edge of your box. This gives you your continuous background for your photos. Top tip: fix it in place with some tape or blutac, but don’t make it permanant as you may want to use different colours in the future!

Position your light source (or sources) outside the box fairly close to the sides. The tracing paper will diffuse the light, spreading it through the box nicely. Using one, two or even three lamps will get different results so play around. I don’t have any lamps yet, so have been using Vince’s ridonkulously bright torch for now. I could use a touch more brightness, but have been getting some OK results as is, so far.

And there you have it. The results aren’t perfect by any means, but they are good enough to allow me to get some new things up on Etsy. Next step will be investing in a couple of good lamps to get brighter results. Hopefully I can find a good, cheap solution to that too.

Laterz!