Johan Mattson

Hello everybody!

So maybe you want to get good photographs of some smaller things you’re going to sell on eBay, like a mobilephone, mp3 player or something like that. Or then what if you’re taking product photographs of smaller products like drinks or fruits and you don’t have a studio?

Well, then you could simply improvise and build your own studio, a macrostudio!

It’s really cheap actually. All you need is …

- A cardboardbox, preferably no smaller than ‘30cm x 30cm x 30cm’.
- Some white baking paper (the stuff you put in the oven) or some grease proof paper, as long as it’s translucent (meaning it lets some amount of light through it) and white, it should be ok.
- Background paper that is a bit thicker and doesn’t let light pass through it, not that much anyway. The first time I used the backside of a movie poster.
- Tape.
- A knife to cut open the cardboardbox and resize the translucent and background paper.

You got all that? Great! Let’s start building.

Step 1:
Cut out three sides of the cardboardbox. (see images below)

Step 2:
Cut and tape the white translucent paper on the sides that you juts cut out.

Step 3:
Put the background paper in place, you can use a bit of tape to kind of “hang it up” in the back of the box.

The result should look a bit like this:

As lighting equipment you can use anything from a flash, to a normal desktop lamp to a 300-500W construction light, just make sure most of the light passes through the translucent paper or something else that diffuses it, to get soft or almost nonexistant shadows … rather than strong, sharp and fugly shadows.
I myself used two 300W construction lights.

Here’s my setup:

And here are some of my best results:

I had this idea before, but when I read Strobists blog article on it, it really inspired me and pushed me to do this!

Also check out this short video I made of the macrostudio, or the “Poor Man’s Macrostudio” as I named it.

I will probably make a new and better video about it once I get my workstation up and running again.