How to make your own, cheap light tent!

So this is a little later than planned. Sorry; it's been a super busy week for me. I performed Mozart's Requiem in front of an archbishop on Friday which is always fun. Also there were brownies when I went up to Leeds which makes me a happy bunny!

So, I've been having problems taking decent photos of my crafts recently. Living in a flat in London, especially at this time of year, the light is brief and usually quite weak. Having nowhere outside that I would be happy taking expensive jewellery out in order to photograph, I decided to finally bite the bullet and build myself a light tent.

For those of you who don't know about them, light tents are great things. They essentially diffuse harsh light to eliminate unwanted shadows and allow you to totally control every aspect of your lighting. There are professional models like this one, the EZ Cube:

www.ezcube.com

but these can run to some pretty high prices before you even start thinking about lighting setups. For somebody like me who's only wanting to take decent photos for online auction sites, shelling out upwards of £100 seems a bit excessive. So I had a look around at the basic construct and thought "hey, I bet I could make one of those!".

So I did. The total cost? £3.12 :D

So, first, I want to show you some 'before' photos. Below are two photos I took of the Breyer model horse 'Polaris' who will be modelling some tack for me in a later post. There's one photo without flash and one photo with flash.

The exposure has been corrected here, but even so, the details get drowned out.

Here, the flash totally wipes out the whites and flattens a lot of the detail.

Poor Polaris doesn't look that great. He really does have a beautiful black rabicano pattern, but from these pictures you wouldn't know it. These photos were both taken indoors with normal yellow light. They'd be slightly better if taken outside, but you're constantly at the whim of the weather when taking photos outdoors (though if you want to try, overcast days are better than bright sunny days since the light is 'softer').


So, what you'll need to make your very own cheap light tent:

• a cardboard box. Big enough to fit whatever you want to photograph inside it. I think the bigger the better. I saved mine for almost a year before I got around to using it, but you could always ask a supermarket or another shop if they have any they're throwing out at closing time. 
• White tissue paper or fabric. I used tissue paper because it was free and on hand. Basically anything white and translucent will work.
• Daylight bulb (and a desklamp to put it in, of course). This is the most important part of the kit. I really recommend getting a daylight one since yellow light can really distort colours. They're pretty easy to find on the internet. I bought mine for £1.62
• Pretty paper to use as a backdrop. I bought mine from Paperchase for £1.50 but you could use anything lying around, really. Even last year's wrapping paper!
• Scissors/craft knife. Anything that will be able to easily cut your box
• Ruler
• Pen
• Tape. I used brown shipping tape because I had it on hand but I imagine anything would work.

Step One: Take your cardboard box and cut out four of the panels--what will be the front, top and both sides. Measure out about a two inch border around each panel to make the 'skeleton' stronger; otherwise your box will collapse under its own weight.

Sorry for the wonkiness, but you get the idea!

Step Two: Cover the top and sides with the tissue paper/fabric. Make sure the tissue paper is taut and that all edges are taped down firmly so that no errant light can sneak inside.

Now, you could leave it like this. It depends on what you want to take photos of, but if you take photos of very reflective items like I do, you'll want to add another flap that covers the front (but don't be a muppet like me and tape it all up before realising you need to be able to put stuff in and take it out again *facepalm*)

Here, I've folded down the flap to cover the front and cut a hole to fit the lens of my camera through. This is only needed when I'm taking photos of something like a piece of silver; it stops you from taking a photo of yourself taking a photo... Mostly, I leave this flap up.

Yeah, it doesn't look pretty, but that doesn't matter ;)

Step Three: Fit your backdrop. The idea of this is to have a nice curve from the back top edge all the way down to the near bottom edge, leaving no creases and lines to show up in the photos.

Step Four: Set up your desktop lamp nearby as in the image above, turn off the lights and snap away!

Now you can start taking your photos. Here's Polaris modelling some of that tack I was telling you about earlier:

Now that you can control your lighting, you can try out all sorts of interesting effects. Try lighting from the side only, or putting some coloured tissue paper over one side. Experiment! Go wild! You'll find it a lot easier to get the photos you want now :)

And all for £3.12. I hope somebody finds this little tutorial helpful!

Tune in again to see more about that tack as well as an update on my Etsy shop.