PhotographyMicro studio for macro photography
Shooting small objects is difficult. You never seem to have enough light, and when you do, it's not coming from the right direction, or it's not soft enough, or there's a shadow that draws too much attention.... you get my point. So I decided to build a controlled lighting environment, a light tent if you will, specifically for small objects. I decided on a cube with a side of 50 cm lifted 50 cm from the floor. I built it from 5/8" grey PVC electric tubing. This stuff is easy to come by, it's strong, easy to process, and you can buy clips that snap onto it, in order to suspend light bulbs or small flash heads from it. For simplicity and by means of experiment I kept the number of light sources down to 6 pieces of 40 W reflector bulbs, and made some extension tubes to have a little flexibility. This is what I ended up with:
This is how the lamps clip onto the tubes. You have your standard wall clip, a small piece of tube, and a lamp holder with an attached angle bracket:
One of the extension tubes:
Here's the bill of materials, might come in handy should you want to build this yourself:
- 10 m grey PVC 5/8" tubing
- 20 snap-on type wall mounting clips for the tube
- 4 rubber end caps 16mm
- 6 lamp holders E27, with angled bracket
- 2 wall socket plugs
- 10 m lamp cord
- 20 M4x30 bolts and (locking) nuts
Tools used:
- Dremel type rotary tool
- 5/8" sanding barrel
- cutting disc
- 4 mm drill bit
- PVC or super glue
- small screwdriver
Unfortunately our dog completely trashed this setup, when it locked itself in my work room for almost a day. I'll be building a bigger, better one.
Update (10-2008): I eventually bought a real 32" light tent. It is foldable, almost dog proof and best of all, the Chinese can build this cheaper than I can. Lately, Ebay is being flooded with cheap photographic gear. I'm pretty sure it's all useless for a working photographer, but for the occasional shoot these things are perfect.
© Joris van den Heuvel, Fuzzcraft.com