$1 Wannabe Light Box Using Posterboard, an Iphone, & a Free App

When I browse etsy my eyes tend to turn a particularly bright shade of envious green.  I always tell myself that the shop owner MUST have an expensive light box or photography degree of some sort.  After about a year of selling online and refusing to believe I could ever get the quality of my photos anywhere near what I was seeing on etsy, I decided to do something about my poor sad photos. 

 

I am here to tell you that it does not cost an arm and a leg nor do you HAVE to buy a DSLR camera in order to drastically improve the quality of your photos.  Whether you photograph for a blog, ebay, etsy, facebook, or otherwise, it really does not take much.  Now to be fair my photos still are far from perfect but lets just see how far I've come.

 

Let's take a stroll down Photo Shame Lane shall we....

 

I was so impressed with my new found sewing abilities that to me this photo was great.  I was emotionally attached to the object already and forgot that my viewers couldn't feel that emotion through this drab dark photo.  Look closely and you can even see the rails from the back of the chair....next slide.

 

 

Obviously in this photo I thought shadows and a sheet added that sexy sleek appeal.  WRONG.  When I look back at some of these photos I am shocked I sold anything at all.  These are actually wonderful rice heating pads but that message does not come through in this photo.

next slide please...

 

Lets skip ahead a few months.  By this time I had been reading some blogs and selling items that I made a few of at a time.  I figured this warranted an extra effort photography wise, since I would be relisting items a few times without changing photos.

 

Granted this photo is much improved but I still had not figured out that sheets do not make a good back drop.  No matter how hard you try it will still look like a sheet.

 

 

Okay that is enough.  Now let's see how I drastically improved my photos with a home floor lamp, an iPhone camera, and $0.33 pieces of poster board, and the aviary app.

 

 



Still not quite as white as some I've seen but 1000 times better.

 

Lets see what my photo shooting area looks like from behind the scenes.

 

 

Now this might not work for larger project but works great for what I am photographing.  Look I didn't even bother to take off the upc tag.  With this set up you can make your photos look a lot better without spending a lot of cash.  I know I am not in a place right now to invest in a DSLR camera.  But, with just the aviary app (brighten, contrast, sharpen, and crop features is all I use), I took my photos from

this...

to this

from this

 

 

To this.

 

 

This concludes my impromptu blog post for this evening.  I hope you find it encouraging.  I still have a ways to go in capturing that perfect white background etsy worthy photo but improvement is improvement.  Happy shooting.