Photo Light Box Improvements

A while back, I posted a guest post over on the Quiltsy Team Blog about a little photo booth that I had built from an old cardboard box, tissue paper, and tape.

This setup worked pretty well for a while, but over time, the box started collapsing in on itself, and I got some holes poked in the paper. Also, the box was pretty small compared to the types of things I needed to take pictures of, and so I started brainstorming for a more durable solution.

Usually, my brainstorms lead me to some type of hardware store, and this turned out to be true on this occasion as well. Essentially, I needed something relatively simple to build, lightweight, and impart the same kind of quality to the images as I had before (or better if I could!)

I decided on PVC for constructing my new box, and decided to make it a 24" cube instead of the 16" one I had before. Lowe's was the perfect place to go for this, since I've always found the people who work there to be quite willing to work with me to refine my ideas, come up with different options, and then assemble the perfect set of supplies.

In this case, the guy in the plumbing department understood exactly what I was trying to build, and he even cut all of the PVC down to the correct size to make my cube. He also found the right connectors & elbows to turn it into a cube. Since I wasn't building this to hold water, he advised that I could skip the pipe dope & just dry-fit everything together.

Next stop was the fabric store. Tissue paper just isn't very durable, and for a light box you really need something in a single piece ( so you don't cast shadows) and also have the right level of translucence to diffuse the light without obscuring it. I found a piece of organza-like material in the drapery department for a very reasonable price.

So! I built the new light box, draped the material over the top, sides and back, and attached the fabric with tape. Huh?

Ok - so it wasn't going to be durable in the long run, but I wanted to get the studio back in business! I also hadn't considered that my new box was too large to use poster board as the backdrops as I had normally done - so I was still constrained by the largest single-sheet of poster board that I could get. This setup led to many a creative photo shot as I sought out a solution.

The challenge with getting an appropriate backdrop is that you want something you can fairly-easily color correct if you need to, especially if you are not a very good photographer (like me.) White poster board was perfect for this, because no matter how crappy my lighting was, my computer could figure out that the poster board was true white & adjust the surrounding colors accordingly.

I also wanted to be able to use different color backdrops. White isn't great for everything, so having black is also a must.

And then, the other day, it hit me. I've been ordering vinyl banners up the wazoo... wouldn't a nice pristine piece of vinyl work for the backdrop?

Eager to try this out (and also to get a more trusty solution to the temporarily taped fabric which started coming loose), I headed to the fabric store in search of the elusive vinyl. I only found black at the first store, but I found a bigger selection of colors at another.

I decided to string up a few wires on the inside top of the cube, one of which allows me to clip the backdrops on, and the others which allow me to suspend things in the air if I so choose. Here are pictures of my pretty-much-complete photo light box!



Here is a picture of the inside where you can see the metal wire at the back with the backdrop clips, and the fishing wire strung in two locations.



I decided to stitch the fabric to the frame using perle cotton thread (like what you would use to string heavy beads) and was able to get a very nice fit around the frame.

I've taken a few pictures with my white backdrop, and here are the results!





Happy quilting!