Make a Light Tent in a Minute
By Mayank Sharma. Posted
This article was originally published as part of HackSpace magazine, which has since been incorporated into Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.
One of the essential elements for tabletop photography (besides a good prime lens) is a light tent. Instead of shelling out money for one, you can create one yourself with some white paper and binder clips (and save the money for the lens).
Nathan Moroney is a Principal Scientist at HP Labs and details the build on his personal blog.
The process requires three A3-size sheets of medium thickness, and four binder clips. Read through his blog to fold the sheets of paper to create the three sides of the light tent. Two are mirror copies of each other and are used as the sides, while the third makes up the back and the bottom.
The binder clips help connect the three folded pieces of paper. Kudos to Nathan for complementing the textual description with visual representations of the folds. You can customise the tent as per your needs, such as substituting the white sheets of paper with coloured ones. Nathan suggests adding more binder clips to add more stability to the contraption.
He uses the light tent for shoots with indirect office lighting or reflected sunlight. It’s a wonderful hack that comes in handy when you’re away from your studio: “It takes me about a minute to make one from scratch.”
Mayank is a Padawan maker with an irrational fear of drills. He likes to replicate electronics builds and gets a kick out of hacking everyday objects creatively
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