I am making an online store. It’s not ready yet; I’ll let you know when it is. The reason for the store is that I make so many things, but I don’t have use for all of them, so I thought I’d put them out there for others to buy.
I want the product photos to look nice: consistent lighting, plain background, easy to see the details of the work. The price to buy a ready-made photo box or tent can go from $20-200, or more. I haven’t actually seen any for AU$20 anywhere, but apparently you can get something that does the job on Amazon for the US$20 range. Really it’s going to be more like $60-120 and I’ll have to wait for shipping.
I decided I could make my own. There are lots of tutorials for making your own, many involve baking paper and a cardboard box. I wanted something a bit sturdier that I can also fold down or take apart to pack away, perhaps a bit like this. So I browsed my local hardware store to see what kind of pipes, poles, and corner connectors I could find. I found some copper-finish plumbing pipe corners and dowel that fits them perfectly!
I was hoping to be able to pass the dowel all the way through the 3-way connectors, reducing the amount of cutting I had to do, but alas, it wasn’t to be. I ended up cutting the top and back struts into three to add the 3-way connectors for the supports.
The materials I used are:
- (8) 12.5 (d) x 500 (l) mm dowel
- (12) 12.5 x 160mm dowel
- (8) 15mm copper pipe corners
- (8) 15mm copper pipe 3-way connectors
- Loctite Super Glue Power Flex
- Tape measure
- Pencil
- Hand saw
- Tablecloth
And here’s a photo I took in the lightbox. Not too bad, I might need to tweak the processing, and iron the fabric under the items, but I’m otherwise happy!
The photo turned out really good!