Sunday, November 25, 2007

Homemade Light Box

A picture is worth a thousand words. How true is that! Especially in the e-commerce business, a picture of your item can make or break a sale. If your picture is bad, no matter how great your item is, it's not going to appeal to anyone else, because anyone else doesn't know how great your item is, all they have to go by is your description and your picture.

One of my biggest problems when taking pictures of our items is the lighting. My picture would come out too dark, or I'll have a snippet of my TV in the background because I don't have a great place for a backdrop in my apartment.

I figure a light box is the way to go, but I don't want to spend money for one. So I made one.

What you need (and you can probably find these laying around your house somewhere):

  • Cardboard Box
  • White Paper
  • Ruler
  • Glue
  • Scissor
  • Razor
  • Tape
  • Light source, of course
Directions (my description here might suck, but once you see the pictures, it'll make sense. Trust me)
  1. Found a cardboard box, I taped the bottom to make sure it's securely in place
  2. Using a razor, I cut out one side of the box. This side will be used as the bottom of the light box.
  3. Using a razor, I cut out two of the four top flaps of the box. (Look at the picture for reference)
  4. The other three sides, using a razor, I cut open three big rectangular holes. (Again, look at the picture, you'll know what I'm talking about)
  5. I took some white papers, measured them to the measurement of the side of the box and cut them out
  6. I glued the cut out paper to the respective three cut out sides of the box. Make sure to glue the paper on the inside of the box, not the outside.
  7. I glued the bottom of the box with white paper as well, making this my white background when I'm taking pictures. You can use any background color you want, just find that color paper and glue it on the bottom of the box.
  8. Place the box appropriately. The bottom of the box is now your background. The one side of the box that you cut out is now the bottom of the box. Find a large piece of white paper, and tuck it in between the background portion and the bottom of the box.
  9. Place your light source, (light, sunlight, flash, whatever you use) in front of box, adjust your lighting according. And viola! You have a light box.
Here's what I took in the box: Finally, my background is just white! No snippets of my apartment appearing behind it!




By the way, you can purchase the items shown here at DaibeBeads.com

1 comments:

Unknown said...

That's funny! I was trying to take pics of some chunky crayons the other day--on my kitchen countertop. HA! At first I took pics from above on a white sheet of paper. But then I wanted to do a side view and also pics of them packaged--so I propped up a cookbook and placed several white sheets of paper in front of it, and had the ones on the bottom--and the pics turned out similar to yours with the light box!