Over here at the Enemy of Good Enough we seem to be finding ourselves working on a new type of project every week.  Soundproofing a room for audio recording?  Check.  Building a light stage for video shoots?  Check.  This week?  I found myself needing some high quality shots of some small drill battery packs (for PowerGenix Battery Corp.) without a decent camera or lighting setup on hand.  Shots will only be as good as the camera, and our usual DSLR was out of the shop so I had to use the dinosaur (Nikon CoolPix E990).

So what is the best solution?  Build a lighting box that can deal with the shortfallings of the camera.  I'd found some instructions for a light box online months ago (unfortunately I couldn't find and reproduce them here) so I recreated it from memory.

As you can see the design is pretty straight-forward.  I ran through the office and found the biggest (and, as it turned out, oldest) cardboard box I could, this one was about 18x18x24".  I enlarged it a bit by taping the front panels out and set the top panel up at about a 30-degree angle.  I lined the inside of the box with white posterboard to increase the light reflectivity, then (as you can see in the second photo) draped a piece of 24" wide bright white paper from the top rear edge to the front bottom edge for seamless photography.

I cut four flaps, each about 8x8" (the two on either side are the most important) and diffused them with vellum.  With this design the two sides will always be lit and light can be coming from either/both flaps on the top, as well as through the front.  To light it I used the same 1000W Work Lights that you saw in our Lighting Stage.

So how do the shots look you ask?  Judge for yourself.

Not bad for an old cardboard box and about 30 minutes of work!  Can't wait to try it out with the DSLR.