Saturday, March 15, 2008

Let There Be Light!

I have a really hard time taking nice pictures of my creations. It's a pain waiting for nice sunny days to get really good lighting, and I tried to create a backdrop to use to give some uniformity, but I felt that they could be taken up another notch. So, I decided to look into getting a lightbox. After pricing them, I decided to look into making my own. I found a great site - click here - with a couple nice tutorials. I changed it up a little, and built my own out of some PVC pipe. It was UBER easy and cheap - cost about $19. It would have been less, but I had to buy a hacksaw to cut the PVC pipe and that was $6.50, and I didn't have a white twin sheet and that was $5.98 at Wal-Mart.

My finished lightbox is pictured above. I did not use PVC cement to connect the pieces, because I wanted to be able to take it apart and store it. I really don't think the cement is necessary, because all the pieces fit together real tight. I also opted not to hang the posterboard backdrop with screws drilled into the frame as the tutorial had. Instead, I took 4 binder clips, and used zipties to connect them on so I could just clip up the backdrop. I figured this way, the backdrop wouldn't tear on the screws. I also could not find T-joints that screwed into the street elbows, so I has to saw off 2 inch pieces of PVC to connect the top pieces. It worked perfectly!



Above are a couple of pictures I took today it it all assembled. As you can see, I am having some lightning issues as everything has sort of a cream tinge to it. The lamps I am using just have regualr 60W bulbs in them. I think I'm going to have to pick up some 6500K Flourescent bulbs or daylight bulbs and see if that helps my color issues.

1 comment:

SquishyCuteStuff said...

Cool! Thanks for the convo, they the way ☺ I have been playing around with my cardboard box, and I found the daylight bulb makes a world of difference. I bought mine at Walmart... it is a 100 watt CFL daylight bulb, GE brand I think. A package of 2 was a little over $7 ♥