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Building a Table-Top
Photo Light Frame
At one time I had looked into buying a professionally made light box for shooting still life subjects, macro and other small objects. All of the store bought versions that I had seen in the catalogs had problems of one sort or another, and all were rather expensive for the limited amount of use they'd get throughout the year. So, I went to plan "B" and built my own setup.
Building a homemade light box is not a new idea, but I thought by showing off my design it might help someone to visualize just how easy it is to construct one of these setups for yourself. The photo at right shows the completed version of my Photo Light Frame. You can naturally improvise on it's design to fit your own needs.
Decisions, Decisions...
Perhaps, the most difficult part of building the Frame, was deciding on the overall size and shape along with choosing the type material to use for the background. Most of the photographic subjects would be rather small, so building a multi-sided cyclorama wasn't necessary. A simple sweeping background would suffice to give an object the desired "Limbo" effect.
In many large professional studio setups, seamless paper is often used for the background material. But, in my table-top version, I chose to use fabric because it is readily available, comes in many colors and is easy to work with.
Whether you use seamless paper or fabric, the objects you plan to shoot and the available sizes of the background material, will probably dictate the overall size of your frame. So, before starting construction, I went to a local shopping mall to investigate what types of fabric were available.
After looking around, I ended up buying several large bath towels in various "neutral" shades to use as my background material. The towels were relatively inexpensive, measure approximately 32" x 60", they are available in about a dozen colors and when photographed, they give sort of a textured look to the background.
Using fabric has another benefit too. Unlike seamless paper, if the cloth material ever gets dirty or becomes wrinkled, you can simply toss it into a washing machine for cleaning. Try doing that with Seamless Paper!
Getting Started
At a local home center, I bought two 8 foot lengths of 1/2 " plastic water pipe and several elbows, "Ts", plastic caps and some glue. After cutting the pieces to length, it was time for assembly. What I created was a square frame with four legs. The frame measures approx. 32" wide and about 24" deep and stands about 24" above the table. I have a second set of legs which are used when shooting taller items. The overall size is not critical, but it should be an inch or two larger than the width of your background material. This will allow you to use the entire background and keep the legs out of the shot.
Construction
Assembling the Photo Light Frame is not difficult. Glue together the square part of the frame and legs as shown, but leave the connections between the legs and frame unglued. There will be enough tension to friction fit the legs to the rectangular frame and that way the entire setup can be disassembled and stored away in a small place when not in use. Additionally, if you need a wider frame in the future, all you have to do is simply add on another section of tubing.
Photo below shot with 3 color
corrected Florescent flood lamps
Using the Frame
I use paper Art tape to attach the fabric to the plastic frame and secure the frame's legs to the table. For lighting, I have used my Canon 550ex flashes which are equipped with Sto-fen Omni-bounce diffusers. The flashes work well, but naturally, you can't see the actual image until after you click the shutter. So, as of late, I've been using several small flood lamps for illumination. The spring mounted flood lamps were also purchased at the local home center and came equipped with 75w florescent bulbs.
Although the flash units put out more overall light, using the Flood lamps gives you the added benefit of seeing the affect of the lighting prior to shooting. Since a tripod is used for most of these shots, the slower shutter speeds brought on by the use of flood lamps are not a problem. To soften the floods, I use several pieces of photographic diffusion in front of the bulbs.
Whenever I shoot with the florescent flood lights I also shoot a white card frame under the same lighting conditions and store it as a Custom White balance frame. After that, I put the camera (Canon 30d) into the "Custom" White Balance mode and shoot the rest of the photos. As a result, all of the photos are fairly color accurate and require only minor tweaking in post production.
The total cost of building the Photo Light Frame, including three spring clamp lights and flood lamps was probably under $40.00. The setup works great and is an easy weekend project. The entire frame can be setup in a few minutes and taken down for storage again after use.
Hope this setup works for you. Let me know how you make out. Good luck.
© 2007
