Poco Mountain Girl

Since starting my Etsy shop in late October, I’ve found it hard to consistently find good days to photograph my art.  Cold, snow, and especially wind always seem to show up just as I finish a new piece and run out to photograph it.  Frustrating, to say the least.

So I searched around online and read a little about light boxes.  A light box is a box with a white interior and translucent sides to let light in and also soften it.  The ones I was looking at were around $50, but I soon found that people make their own light boxes at home for much cheaper.

Of course, I had to make one then.

I went to the art store and got about $10 worth of materials–2 sheets of foam core, a sheet of poster board, and a roll of white duct tape.  I found a big old piece of heavy interfacing in my scrap box for the translucent sides.  It had fold marks but still worked great.  I cut the foam core and interfacing into four large pieces and taped everything together to make a box with one open side.  Then I trimmed the poster board to fit inside and laid it in a scoop along the bottom and back to form a seamless backdrop.

Now that I had the box, I needed lights.  I’ve had a couple of OttLites for years, so I brought them down to my basement studio (I dug one out of storage and stole the other from Zia’s room).  They were perfect, since they produce full-spectrum natural lighting–bright, white, and non-yellowish.

Light box photo studio in action!

And the results:

As you can see, the light is soft but clear, with no harsh shadows to distract from the object of focus.  (I recently bought two small carving knives and two chisels, and started a bear out of this basswood.  More pics of the bear to come.)

Here is the fox necklace I made a few weeks ago.  I still love the vivid contrast and color of shooting outdoors, but the light box studio makes a nice place to shoot when the weather is crazy.

Hope you liked the light box tour! 😉

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2014 at 6:00 am and is filed under Arty, Earthy Possessions, Making Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.