First try with home made Light Tent

One of the things I would really like to do with my new camera is learn to take great pictures of the food I make. To that end, I've created my very own macro light tent and I gave it a test drive tonight.

A light tent is basically an enclosure that softens/difuses external light so it is nice and even inside the box. I made mine with the wonderful instructions from Strobist - How To: DIY $10 Macro Photo Studio. It really is super easy; as long as you can handle a utility knife and a roll of tape, you're golden.

The creation of the light tent is quick; 15 minutes tops. It's basically a cardboard box with one side removed and windows on three sides. The windows are covered in tissue paper (the kind you stuff into gift bags). There is picture of my setup at the end.

So with no further ado, here are the four of the photos I took tonight.


These have been cropped and the lightened. Adding the fill light has introduced more noise that I like - especially with the coffee bean shot. I don't think my 60W lamp is bright enough and we are out of 100W bulbs - I'll pick one up and try again soon. My white balance is all over the place too -I'm still learning how to correct that.

For the most part - I'm really happy with how they turned out. These were all taken with the kit lens (18-70mm nikkor AFS). If don't know if they would have turned out nicer with a macro lens or not, but I can't afford one right now so I'm going to have to learn to make do.

This is what the whole setup looked like:


On a sad note, I noticed quiet a few dust marks on the photos. I'm hoping they are on the lens or filter and not the CCD. I'm going to have to be more careful with the camera and dust I think.

[update - April 17th, 2007] - If making this light tent is too difficult for you, you can try this one. But unless you have really big pieces of paper, you'll only be able to take pictures of small things.