Southern Composition

I have been so busy with everything going on, I haven't posted anything in quite a while. I now have a jewelry and print store on etsy in collaboration with a college friend- www.ScottieDesigns.etsy.com. So if you want prints of anything featured on the blog email me and I can make something happen. If you want jewelry, our prices are pretty decent and we have a variety of bracelets and earrings and offer custom goods and alterations and repairs. Ok, thats it for the advertisement!

So I built myself a lightbox last night to photograph my retail items- I am a firm believer that pictures are one of the biggest selling points of an object. Previously I had taken every item to work and photographed them in an office with a skylight. This method worked well but I really wanted a studio professional look to my items. Enter, the almighty Lightbox!

Disclaimer- this is a temporary lightbox, more of a test run if you will. I plan on making a more permanent version out of PVC in a few weeks.


I took a Costco size Raisin Bran box, cutout the sides- leaving the bottom, back, and edges. Then I taped the edges to tall pitchers to open up the front of the box, and draped a white dress lining around the outside of the box., followed with a bright desk lamp beaming down from the top... Then I found some nice looking scrapbooking paper at Michaels and taped the front to the bottom of the box, and curved it up to the top of the box with no creases. This creates a smooth borderless background- like you would find in a studio. Got out my items and props, setup the camera on the tripod, and started shooting. It took me about an hour to get 10-20 items done, I ended up with 60 pics and had 44 good useable ones- Pretty good ratio I think! Not to mention the lightbox was perfect- I didnt touch up any of the images I took, just cropped and resized. So here is what my finished product looked like:

And here are some of the shots I took- I loved using the props and  playing around with the aperture of the camera to keep the props in a small blur and keep focus on my item. I think the lighting worked really well and gave the images a real studio look- I am quite impressed with the ghetto-fabulous lightbox!