A lot of people have asked me what gear I use for my mini product shot studio. I don’t have any fancy strobes or other gizmos. I took a long time surfing through home depot and other blogs to find some cheap ways to get some good light on my products. Here’s what it basically looks like so far…

As you can see, *very* low budget. My mom gets annoyed by how cluttered it can get. On the left is a car window reflector. It’s perfect for the job: I can bend it and curve it to reflect light exactly where I need to. On the top and right are Home Depot clamp-able work lights. Not the halogen ones— still wondering if I want to deal with the hassle of a typical halogen-yellowish tint to the light. I screwed in 150-watt equivalent fluorescent light bulbs into the work lights. They are perfectly white light, and they are easily movable to get the light in the right spot. Just these two work lights often do not have enough power to sufficiently light up the box, so I usually just throw in some desk lamps from around the house (like the one I’m holding in the picture above).

To make the light really soft, I used cut rectangles of white trash bags. They seem to do a good job, but they cut out a lot of light. More recently, I got some translucent corrugated plastic from an art store, which is doing a much better job. The box itself is a 20″x20″ cardboard box from the local mailroom. I used an X-Acto knife to cut openings on each side so light can go through. And finally, the background. I got long colored poster paper from Office Depot, and I cut them to fit inside the box. The backgrounds are just long enough that I can curve them from the back face of the box to the bottom face, creating a seamless backdrop. Awesome.

For now, this setup really fits my needs, if not my mom’s needs of a neat house (note that this was all set up on her office desk, oops). I’m probably going to keep improving on it, getting stronger lights, maybe some actual light stands rather than a music stand I found lying around. I might even save up for a flash. We’ll see— as I shoot more with it, I’ll eventually figure out what I want to do to improve it. But in the meantime, it does make some pretty beautiful photographs.

~Kedar