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Building your own light tent

Posted by Haje Jan Kamps

If you are serious about product photography, you can’t get around using a good light tent. Essentially a large diffusor through which you can send light in order to create soft, even lighting, a light tent is a pretty simple device - but they retail at stupid prices from photography stores.

So, we had a look around on the Internet if we managed to find a cheaper solution. Mission successful.

Bill Huber is a clever man, and a thorough one as well - his DIY project on Photo Base not only explains how to build your own light tent at a budget, and how to use it, but it includes some truly inspired product and artistic photos to demonstrate exactly why it is such a good idea to construct a good light tent.

Full instructions are provided, and it honestly is a worth-while investment in your photography bag of tricks - if you don’t believe us, look at the photos he has taken with the equipment - and start building!

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Money made from this advert will be invested in beer.
Posted in: All articles • 19 Dec '05

Insights, suggestions and comments

By Luís Brás on January 28th, 2006 (permalink)

Great tutorial, just what I was looking for, but I think the author uses little light, because the samples show a bit of noise… Maybe good for ebay and similars, but for stock photography it is not enough. Otherwise, seems like a great light tent. I’m going to try this out!

By andyp on January 6th, 2007 (permalink)

I just followed the instructions myself… converted a few of the measurements and materials for the UK… it seems to work very nicely so far.

See
http://andypiper.wordpress.com/2007/01/03/building-a-light-tent-part-1/
http://andypiper.wordpress.com/2007/01/06/building-a-light-tent-part-2-assembly/

I’ll post some of the results to Flickr soon :-)

By Lori on January 30th, 2008 (permalink)

Anyone have any experience shooting clothing in a photo tent? I was looking for a quick way to photograph clothing and list and I don’t like the droopy look on a hanger, and even then, don’t know if I want to take time to photoshop out the hanger since I have high quantities to list at ow prices- it doesn’t make sense to take too much time… Suggestions appreciated!

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This site is all about learning more about photography, from the incredibly insightful (rarely) to the dreadfully mundane (also, hopefully rarely) via just about everything in between.

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