Weekend Photography Project: Build a Light Box

I have family and friends who are terrific at making some really cool stuff. And while much of it looks great in situ, sometimes I want to take a photo that shows something off all by itself, with no background to distract the viewer from the subject of the photo. You know, like this:

Key

To do this sort of photography, you need something called a light box. The key ingredients of a light box are a seamless background and bright, diffuse lighting. You can, of course, buy a commercial one for $100. But with a quick trip to the hardware store, you can build one yourself very cheaply.

Here’s what you’ll need to build this project:

  • 1 10′ 3/4″ length of PVC pipe
  • 4 90° 3/4″ PVC elbow socket fittings
  • 4 Tee 3/4″ Tee elbow socket fittings
  • 1 white posterboard
  • 1 white sheet
  • 1 lamp with daylight bulb
  • tape

Once you’ve got these pieces, start by cutting the 10′ PVC pipe into the following lengths:

  • 6 11″ lengths
  • 4 2″ lengths
  • 2 21″ lengths

Once you’ve cut the pipe to the above lengths, piece together one of the long sides by fitting together the following pieces in order: an 11″ segment, a 90° elbow socket, a 2″ segment, a tee socket, a 21″ segment, a tee socket, a 2″ segment, a 90° elbow socket, and an 11″ segment. Rotate all the bits to look something like this (click for more detail):

Side 1

Friction should be enough to hold the parts together — you shouldn’t need to use any PVC cement. Once you’ve done one of these, do another exactly like it.

Now that you’ve got the two sides built, take the remaining 11″ segments and fit them into the openings on the Tee sockets, like so:

Side and Top

Finally, take the other side and fit its Tee sockets to the 11″ segments you’ve just added to side 1. Flip the box onto its feet, and you should have the frame for your lightbox, ready to go:

Frame Assembled

Now that your superstructure is complete, use the tape to secure the short edge of your posterboard to one of the long 21″ segments along the top of the frame. Allow the posterboard to hang down and to bend naturally, providing a flat surface and a background with a smooth transition between the two:

Posterboard from Front

Posterboard from Side

Now that you have the frame and background in place, simply drape the sheet over the frame. When it is between your subject and your light source, the sheet will act as a light diffuser.

Sheet in Place

Now that you’ve got all the parts in place, put your subject on the flat part of the posterboard, grab your lamp in one hand, your camera in the other, pull the front of the sheet down, and start taking some pictures!

Taking a picture

Some things to try:

  1. Move your light source around. While the sheet helps diffuse the light, the general angle from which it’s coming can still make a fair bit of difference in how your subject looks.
  2. Experiment with light colors. I suggested a daylight (5500K color temperature) bulb to start with, as it will keep you from having to mess with your color balance too much, but it’s possible to get interesting effects with other colors as well.
  3. Try multiple lamps. Having more than one light source can make the lighting even more diffuse, or if you use lights with different colors, can bring out the angles of your subject more obviously.
  4. Take off the white posterboard and try black or another color.
  5. Use a light source with a reflector, like a work light or floodlight. This will help your lighting be both brighter and a bit more diffuse.

If you decide to dive into this project and have any questions, drop me an email and I’ll do my best to help out. Have fun!

UPDATE: A note from my friend Jonathan Ireland, who is a far more accomplished photographer than I am: “Re: #2, if you are aiming to achieve neutral, and your camera supports manual whitepoint adjustment, simply read the lit white background first to set the whitepoint. use the dull side of the posterboard for less glare.”

UPDATE 2: You can also see some more photos taken with this light box rig in my album Liam’s Shop of Horrors.

Mojo

All of you folks who are as interested in location-based gaming as I am have been checking in on Gowalla, Foursquare, SCVNGR, Facebook, Rally Up, or Yelp for a while now. But the lame thing about those services is that you actually have to go somewhere and do something to earn points! Enter Mojo, the web-location based game for folks who are shackled to their desks all through the day but still want the spurious sense of accomplishment that these games bring!

Teasing aside, it’s an interesting concept: allowing people to check-in on various websites and engage with the content there in various ways to earn credit. I’ve added it to the site here; feel free to play around with it if you’d like to see how it works. Just click that little “Earn Mojo” tab on the right to get started. (Though given how infrequently I get around to posting, if any of you earn the “365 Days in a Row” achievement, I’ll be forced to come over there and cut off your internet privileges. Don’t think I won’t.)

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-09-14

  • The great thing about the cheap theater in San Marcos: you can enjoy refreshing summer rain. While inside. #fb #
  • Today Liam bought himself a bullwhip. I can't think of a single thing that could possibly go wrong with that purchase. #fb #
  • Dear American Culture: it actually is OK to be out of sight of a TV and without background music occassionally. Sincerely, Sean #fb #
  • Just spoke to the doc, and all went well with Kathy's surgery today. I should get to see her for myself in about an hour. #fb #
  • For those who want to visit, Kathy is in room 108 in the women's center at CTMC in San Marcos. Visiting hours are over at 8:30. #fb #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-31

  • Enjoyed a great day out with Kathy yesterday: marvelous food, spectacular thunderstorms, tubing, and good music. #
  • Driving those things around looks like big fun. http://twitpic.com/2iefi0 #
  • Attending Lone Star Ruby Conference today. Nerdvana! #
  • Squee! There's a Tesla roadster in the parking lot! http://twitpic.com/2ip2ms #
  • Welcome to 'Anytime Except Now Fitness'! http://twitpic.com/2j48ra #
  • Yay! Won a cap. 🙂 FWD: You are a winner at @LSRC! Come down to the stage and grab your prize. #
  • Second game of Pandemic with the fam. Great game! http://twitpic.com/2jdnns #
  • Coolest web project I've seen in a while. (Best viewed with Google Chrome.) http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com #fb #
  • Dear GMail: why are you suddenly letting through so much spam this past week or two? I miss the good ol' days. -Sincerely, Sean #
  • Pulled out the six string for the first time in quite a while tonight. Played and sang until my fingers finally gave out. Ow, but fun. #fb #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-24

  • Reading through a collection of Philip K. Dick short stories is making me want to re-rent all the movies based on them. #fb #
  • Do other states have gravestones shaped like them or is that uniquely Texan? http://twitpic.com/2ggfwa #
  • My morning Lego effort. http://twitpic.com/2guszz #
  • First day of school in San Marcos! Hope it's a great year for you, my little chickadees! #fb #
  • This morning, I found the face of Richard Dawkins on my quesadilla. I thought it was a miracle, but he assured me it wasn't. #fb #
  • How did jay birds (with feathers) become the gold standard of nakedness? From now on, I want everyone to say "naked as a mole rat." #fb #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-10

  • My lovely bride made orange/date chutney today, and it rocks. Also! Date night at the river, frogurt, and then the movies. #fb #
  • Enjoying a delicious Boca burger. With real bacon. #fb #
  • Sothat's* where they keep them! http://twitpic.com/2c83kv #
  • Celebrating Abigail's 14th birthday. (14? I'm certain she skipped a few years somewhere.) #
  • My stepbrother makes an Indian flatbread that is second to naan. (I know, I know. Sorry about that.) #fb #
  • Why do mornings that start with great intentions so often end with a kitchen catastrophe? #fb #

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Ditching Titanium

Back in March, I posted my Thoughts on Titanium, which we were using at the time to develop Texas State’s iPhone application. Since that time, we’ve become increasingly frustrated with the system, and have finally decided to leave it behind and rewrite the application in a combination of native Objective C code and HTML/CSS/Javascript.

This isn’t a decision we made lightly. I actually resisted it for a number of months, even when some of the other developers on my team were lobbying pretty strongly for it. The promise of Titanium, which allows developers to use Javascript to create native applications for iPhone and Android platforms, was great. Unfortunately, it has never lived up to that promise for us.

The first reason we decided to leave it behind was Apple’s Developer Program License Agreement. When iPhone 4.0 was released, the Agreement was amended to prohibit using intermediary layers like Titanium. The folks at Appcelerator quickly moved to quell their customers’ fears, pointing out that Apple was still approving Titanium-made applications. While it is true that Apple hasn’t lowered the boom yet, these apps still violate the letter of the agreement, and could therefore be pulled from the App Store at Apple’s whim. Further, when RunRev, a company that creates a development tool similar to Titanium, tried to reach an official understanding with Apple, Steve Jobs made it very clear that Apple wasn’t interested. Given this level of hostility to other development tools, staying with Titanium would obviously increase the risk that we’d run afoul of Apple in the future.

The second, and more important, reason was this: Titanium’s engineering is just not good enough for our purposes. It works great for small-scale projects that people want to get done quickly. But as we have tried to build large-scale projects, we have repeatedly run into problems that we would spend hours trying to solve, only to find that there was an issue in Titanium’s code that we couldn’t work around. New versions of the software would cause portions of our code that had worked fine before to stop functioning. Version 1.4 of their framework was released well over a month after they had originally promised it.

As one of the programmers on my team put it: “When I work in [another development environment], I’m 99% sure that any problems I have in my program are because I’m doing something wrong. With Titanium, I’m only about 50% sure.”

To be sure, the folks at Appcelerator have taken on a huge technical challenge, have ramped up quickly, and are working as hard as can be to make their product feature-rich. But after months of frustration, we’re not willing to keep investing in a system that keeps us so far from our programming happy place. Objective C, here we come!

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-03

  • Feeding the critters with Maggie. http://twitpic.com/297w0i #
  • Movies in the Park. Classic Rock. Friendly crowd. Maxfield Parrish skies. Nice. http://twitpic.com/29arki #
  • If I had a wolf suit like Max's in a grown-up size, I'd totally wear it. Let the wild rumpus start! #fb #
  • My lovely wife has apparently become a fully-naturalized southerner: there's a can of bacon grease in our fridge. #fb #
  • I dance with an almost cat-like grace. The only difference is that I always land on someone else's feet. #fb #
  • Daily Shoot: Portrait @dailyshoot #ds258 http://flic.kr/p/8onAWM #
  • Good speech by the Total Engagement guys on games at work. Lots of meat from the book: http://blitl.us/zBZ0 #
  • Making tuna salad with ingredients from desk: I picked up relish, tuna, mayo, and…ibuprofen? What's my brain trying to tell me? #fb #

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