Home made softbox

Every photographer have been thinking about buying softbox lights at least once. However especially for amateurs there is a question of need and if its good idea to spend few hunders bucks for softbox or should I buy new lens instead.

Since I have been thinking in the same way I decided to do softbox by myself and found out that very basic think can be done for 20 USD maximum. How? Lets make a list what we need:

What we need

For homemade softbox studiolight we need following:

• Big Nutella package :)
• 2x "Universal underlay", no idea how its call corectly in english. Anyway It is simply silver underlay that protect you when you sleep in nature (protecting human budy from humidity and temperature when you lay down in the forest).
• 1x light diffuser, simply something what makes light softer. You can use what ever. If you have Collapsible Reflector Disc with semi-transparent white fabric, you win. Easyest way is to buy 1 meter of curtain without any texture/pattern. Such a small piece you can get even free in special shops with curtains.
• 4x wooden Lath (thiniest one), for framing front rectangle of softbox
• Sticky tape, stickers, binder and pencil.
• Flash light

Make a template from paper of final form. You will need for several reasons: first you wanna to make same sides of the softbox, second its better to make a paper model first because its quite dificult to make it right at first try. Do not forget that you need few cm (1 inch) on the borders. I have used A3 paper for template. When you have temlate simply copy it to underlay and make sides of softbox which you can put together by binder. Sticky tape you can youse for finishing. The rest is clear i think, just use tripod as softbox stand and you win.

Results

Its is definitevly not the pro version of softbox which you can use outside however for playing and fun its not that bad. Here are the results:

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 27th, 2010 at 3:53 am and is filed under How to, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.