I am lucky enough to have a decent photobox set up in my home workspace. It's a decent lightbox with a couple of easily maneuverable lights, and it's really good for objects that I can bring to it. A lightbox is really nice to be able to offer an "infinite background" to a picture in addition to nicely diffusing the light to remove glare and make it even.
If, however, one doesn't have easy access to a lightbox itself, there are alternatives that are both easy and cheap. Here's a cheap, "poor man's" lightbox that I put together with only parts from the dollar store.
I started with a trifold as the base layer. I use the trifold to provide a decent base to put everything upon.
The primary purpose for the trifold is to hold the other components. The trifold itself isn't necessary if there is some other way to hold the next component, which is a large sheet of paper. The goal is to allow for an "infinite background," which is really just a curved background that does not have an identifiable corner, or edge. In this instance I used a sheet of black paper for the background (because the white sheet that I was going to use had been confiscated by one of my children for a school project).
Looks nice, right? But see where the light really shines off the bend of the sheet? I don't like that. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if I was using the white paper I had, but I'm just going to need to deal with it.
And because I have it, I then put a white acrylic square on the sheet to act as a stage. I also have a black one. Somewhere. The white one was handy. Ironic. To help alleviate the lightshine off the curve on the black paper I also put the light umbrellas on my light setup. There are alternatives to this, such as using a light shade, lamp shade, or even holding paper up in front of the light; any way to diffuse the light would work.
So now that I have a setup, what should I photograph? Luckily I have a huge array of toys, all of which are very photogenic. How about a Lego Minifig Hulk?
To take this I put the camera right nearly onto the desk. And it looks good, I suppose, but it's just a green hulk, and a small green hulk at that. Let's add some colour. How about a Red She Hulk?
On these pictures, notice the horizon where the white acrylic stage meets the black background and see how the demarcation is blurred. If both the stage and the underlying sheet were the same colour we'd see an "infinite background" instead. Regardless, this is a neat effect, and I like it.
Now to add another She Hulk, but this one green. I was bumping the aperture up high to be able to keep all the items in focus, and ended up moving the ISO up to 1600 as well. It's creating a little noise, but nothing horrible for this particular photoshoot.
Do you see the little round flecks on the back background? No, they're not ghost orbs. The sensor in my camera needs to be cleaned.
Now let's add The Savage Hulk. Who knew there were so many hulks?
There's still an issue with the shine off the black part of the background. It would be mostly easy to fix in post-processing with Photoshop, but since this post is all about shooting on a budget, I'll suggest using Gimp instead; it's free, and has a large feature set. Fixing a background is something that it can easily handle. I'll save that for another post. Instead, let's add more Hulks!
And finally, a Red Hulk! Because more hulks are better than one.
Despite my camera sensor needing cleaning, and even without cleaning up the black background in post processing, these pictures turned out pretty decent with a really cheap and easy to create studio and infinite-background setup. It took little time and I was able to get some decent pictures. This is a useful trick to have if you need to take pictures of items to sell, or just to show off.
Stay tuned; I'll likely have some more DIY-and-Cheap-Ass photo techniques in the near future.
(c) All images and photographs, unless otherwise specified, are created and owned by me.
(c) Victor Wiebe
(design by remyrequinart: https://steempeak.com/@remyrequenart)