Tutorial: How To Make A Lightbox

Today I would like to show you how I made my own lightbox, easily and with a few bucks.

To start with you will need:

-An empty box
-White paper
-A ruler
-Scissors
-A pen
-Adhesive tape or glue
-A cutter
-Two daylighth lamps

First:

We make some marks on each side of our box, leaving a small margin. We are not going to touch the bottom of the box, neither one of the sides, so it won´t be necessary to make marks on those places.




Here, we can see the marks and the margins that we need to made. Try to leave 2-3 cms of border (4/5 - 6/5 inches).

Now, carefully, we cut each side. I would suggest to make incisions with the cutter to open a whole. Then, we could use the scissors for the rest of the job.

As you can see, now we have a box with three "windows". You can polish the imperfections but don´t worry too much about that.

Next step, we cover each side (window) with white paper (here, a thin white fabric could work too, as long as it allows the light to pass through it). We can glue the paper or use adhesive tape.

Then, adjust the paper to the box, cutting the surplus. It should look something like this:

Now we are almost getting there. A small tip: for the background you can use the back of a poster, in case you wanted to take photos in a white background.

Here you have a example of the position of the lamps:

And finally, I took this picture using my homemade lightbox. To build it, I just needed 1h 30 min.

Easy, quick and cheap!

I hope you have found this tutorial useful!

Thanks for reading!