With the arrival of Saber the need arose of some way of taking pictures under better lighting conditions. After some research I figured what I needed was a light tent. A light tent is a great way to get even nondirectional lighting for small objects in what is basically a small photo studio. The walls of the tent defuse the incoming light and also reflect any light that hits them eliminating shadows and giving a neutral background, but after seeing what a photo store wants for one I figured it would be cheaper make my own. I looked around on the net and found a couple of different ideas and settled on some thing similar to this one.

Here is Saber Under Normal room lighting things come out yellowish as most of the lighting is old style florescent. Even with a flash giving fill lighting there are still shadows and basically everything looks yucky. So I head out to the hardware store after work and pick up some PVC pipe. This stuff make great building material as it is cheap and is pretty strong for it’s size. I ended up getting more pipe then I need but it worked out as I goofed in my planing for the size of the tent and it came out overly large. It weird how what seems like very reasonable dimensions on paper suddenly becomes a very large volume once the thing gets built.

Now most people will tell you to just cut the pipe with a hacksaw but I find that slow and awkward, then when your done you have to clean up the cut as the saw basically rips through the plastic. What I found works best is a special pipe cutter they are made just for cutting pvc pipe. You can get them for under 10 bucks, they are a lot faster then a hack saw and when your done the ends are clean. You can see all the parts above. I didn’t glue anything together so I can break it down for easy storage.

The first picture above is the tent fully assembled. The cloth is just a white bed sheet I picked up. The two lamps on the side are just a couple of desk lamps that I got for about 6 bucks apiece, for bulbs I am using CFLs. The CFL have a couple of advantages, they let me use a brighter light then the fixture is rated for; the lamps say to only use a 40 watt bulb but using a CFL I can get the same light as using a 75 watter. The also run a lot cooler then normal bulbs and being so close to the cloth fire is something you have to watch out for. The bulb I found also have another nice feature, they are rated at a light temperature of 6000K or about the same a bright sunlight this will make getting a good color match alot easier.

And so I leave you with a pic of Saber. The tent still needs a little work. I am think I may need even brighter bulbs then I have now to get a little better lighting. I need to get some poster board to make a seamless backdrop and the sheet need to be ran through the wash and maybe ironed to get rid of the wrinkles. I might also have to cut the sheet down some at it is more then a bit too big.

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