A Weekend Project: Building a Light Box From a Cardboard Carton

You can spend a lot of money on a lighting setup for small objects. You can also spend an afternoon and about the price of a coffee, and for most purposes the difference is invisible.

What you need

A cardboard carton at least forty centimetres on a side, a roll of baking parchment, a sheet of white card, tape and a craft knife. That is the entire bill of materials. The parchment is the diffuser, the white card is the seamless background, and the box is everything else.

The expensive version of this is a box with parchment on three sides. So is the cheap version.

Cutting and assembling

Cut a large window out of three sides — left, right and top — leaving a five-centimetre frame for rigidity. Tape parchment over each window from the outside. Curve the white card from the back wall down to the front lip so there is no corner line; that curve is what makes the background read as infinite.

Light it with any two lamps you already own, one through each side window, and put your object about a third of the way back. That is it. That is the whole technique.