Myerson Photo Blog

For this first DIY lighting post, I decided to go uber-simple. We’ll be putting together a lighting box for shooting isolated products. It couldn’t be any easier.

Step 1: Get yourself a box.
Step 2: Don’t throw away the old vinyl liner from the shower curtain.
Step 3: Try not to cut your fingers with the utility knife.

That’s about it. I took a large box (24″ x 30″ x 24″), and cut away the top and a side. I also cut a window in the front to shoot through. Over the open top and down the open side, I draped an old vinyl shower curtain liner (My wife was kind enough to save for it me, rather than throw it away, when it became too disgusting to keep using). As you can see, I opted for the hand clamp method of connecting shower curtain to cardboard.

Inside the box is some posterboard to create my white sweep.

In the setup photo above, you can see the box setup works fine with just a single speedlight. The sample image below was shot with a single speedlight coming through the top of the box. I experimented with a two light setup – one above, and one from the side – but frankly one light does the trick here. If you can afford some noise reduction (that is, if you don’t plan on submitting to iStock, or if you plan to downsample before submitting to iStock), you can drop the speedlight power down to about 1/4 and bump up the ISO to make up for the exposure difference. That allows you to save on speedlight batteries, and have a nice fast recycle time.

The box I used allows for a set up large enough to shoot products anywhere from very small to the size of a small cat. My cat is largish and uncooperative, so you’ll see no shots of her here.  This would be a great set up for an eBay photo shoot, or even for a catalog of smallish objects. The big downside is that it’s a big box that doesn’t store well; there’s no way to collapse it down. The upside, of course, is that it was basically free because I used found objects. If I had to buy the box and the vinyl, I’d have been out maybe $15.