Saturday, December 17, 2011

Photographic Light Box


Like many wargamers, I struggle to get good photographs of my figures in the cold weather months when I can't use an overcast day to illuminate my figures. I've always wanted a photo light booth, but the prices have always scared me away. Recently I decided to finally spend the money and to my surprise, after doing some research I found this Cowboy Studio tabletop light box for under $40.00!
There are a lot of nice features, first it's portable so I can carry it to my club's game nights. Second it's inexpensive and comes with several separate backdrops. Third it comes with some portable lighting included. The lights that come with it are unfortunately not powerful enough to use to illuminate your subject THROUGH the transparent sides, but at the price, that's not a nit I'm willing to pick.

It's going to take me a while to get in the swing of using this portable studio, but even on the first day I'm seeing DRASTIC improvements. Compare these photos of my recently completed Seleucid Cataphracts to the photographs I took in my previous post. Night and day difference!







3 comments:

DeanM said...

Looks good, Allan. I will have to look into something like this. I've ended up using the flash on my digital camera a lot. I used to use lights, but that takes a little time to set up. The flash sometimes washes out the colors. Best, Dean

ZeroTwentythree said...

Looks good. I was just looking at that same light box, and a couple similar items, at Amazon.com earlier this week.

The reviews for all of them (as with yours) did cite the lights as being almost universally garbage -- not only that they weren't powerful enough, but in many cases they either quickly broke or were broken upon arrival. So I've been thinking about building my own light box instead.

AJ (Allan) Wright said...

The light box itself is MORE than worth the $40.00