Do it yourself - Project Lightbox

Pedro G. Dias came up with a way to make one sturdy light box. This article will tell the Story of The Making of the Lightbox.

So This item is all about how information traverses the web, and how by mere coincidence, Pedro got to know about this light box from a fried who got it from a web site, and hoe finally I got the mail that tells me to post the story… here is how it goes:

I’ve been drooling for a lightbox for a long time now, especially with winter coming, and sun going hide&seek up here in Norway. A good friend of mine recommended a website where a very nice guy had made a project out of it, so I thought I’d try it out for myself, and here are some of the highlights of that feat. A big cheers to the author of this page for letting me know how easy this is to do. The concept and cudos for this goes to him.

My own box differs from the original project in that I made a reinforced box in thin finner (4mm) to hold the foamy paper. I was not able to find anything as solid as he did, so I had to back it up with some extra wood.
Here are the images of my project:

diy lightbox 01

The first thing you need to do is get your materials together. You will need:

Plywood
Some square poles
Foam boards
Power strip
4 clamp lights
Hammer, nails, glue x-acto knife… all the usual stuff you’ll find lying around from your last project.

diy light box - almost there
Next you need to plan how the box will look like. Well, it is “just a box”, so nothing fancy is needed as far as plans go. You can get some ideas here, and some video tutorial on this site (man, it’s still good old school wmv’s and not this young generation youtube things). As far as size go, make it larger then the tings you want to shoot. Note that the corners of the box kinda stick out. Later you will use those stick out things to hook your lights to, so make sure you have enough extra wood there. Also note that the “frame” of the box is on the out side, we’ll come to that later….

Here is how it loks like when it is done:

light box project - done

light box - glue the foam board The next step is making the box shiny white. This is what gives you that nice diffused light. Start off by measuring the inner box. remember that you placed the frame on the outside of the box. now you should be very happy you made this decision. Cut the boards to the sizes you had and glue them into the inner side of the box. You should end up with something kinda like the image on the left.

Lastly hook the light in. You will need four clamp lights. You can use low power lights, as long as you use a tripod to steady your shot. you might also want to consider them new spiral fluorescent bulbs from Philips. They give a nice balanced light and don’t create alot of heat. Place the power strip somewhere close. mount the clamps on that extra frame thingy you have, plug in the power cords and you are ready to go. Here is how it looks like when you are done.

light box - finito