DIY lightbox for product photography

I frequently visit Ken Rockwell's site for some pleasant reading about photography gear and shooting tips. His articles have very detailed, clear images of the tested equipment. Last week I decided to try and create some product photos of my own. I want to sell some of my stuff so the images could also be used for future sales purposes.

Now I am mostly an available light photographer and only use flash at parties with friends. I have a Meike MK-300 TTL flash for my Canon 5D, it a small but capable flash. I have a Nikon SB-400 diffuser for it, I tought I would use this combo to take some shots. I read up on product photography and decided that I needed to build a lightbox. I used a simple cardboard box, cut out 4 sides, covered 3 of them (left, right, top) with printing paper(thinner paper would have better light transmittance) and left the front of the box uncovered. I also use paper as a backdrop inside the box.

For lighting I tried using two bedroom lights at the sides and the flash at the top. This gave mixed results since the bedroom lights are much warmer so the images either had correct white balance for the warm lights and blue highlights from the flash or correct white balance for the flash but yellow highlights from the lamps.

You can see the blue and yellow highlights despite having the correct WB for the backdrop

(Meteor 5-1 17-69mm f1.9 lens)

After these trials I ditched the flash. Instead I used slow shutter, iso 100 and set the exposure to +1. The results are much better this way.

Now the whites are white, lighting looks more diffused

This lighting setup is only good for product photography and still life. For other uses such as water droplet photos I use the flash without the lamps. Two flashes would be better for more even lighting but it's not bad.

Here is a gallery of my DIY lightbox shots, you can see images taken using all the lighting combinations.

Created with flickr slideshow.