How to Make an Inexpensive Photobox

 

Photoboxes are fantastic because they softly and evenly distribute light and eliminate distracting backgrounds. They are used mainly for small items and food. Next time you visit a cooking or recipe website, really take the time to figure out how they got the shot they did and odds are you'll be able to recognize that they used a photobox. It's also one of the best ways to showcase small objects that you want to sell, like homemade crafts, or even just objects you want to turn into wall art, like your wedding ring or a perfect flower you picked from your garden. Depending on the size of the box you make, the possibilities are endless!

What you'll need:

• a box (I chose the "large cube" box at the Post Office because they give them for free!)
• white tissue paper
• a white, flexible poster board (CVS sells a smaller size by a random brand for 99 cents)
• a sharp chef's knife or an x-acto knife
• scissors
• duct tape (I found 10 yards at CVS in the dollar section!)

Making your box:

• Time: 30-40 minutes

1. Close the bottom flaps of your box (without overlapping) and tape them tightly.
2. Lay the box on its side with the top flaps facing you.
3. Take the flaps and duct tape each together (at 90 degree angles), so that the box is longer.
4. Using the knife, cut rectangles out of three sides, leaving a 1'' border (I marked where I would cut with a pen first).
5. The side you didn't cut is now the bottom of your photobox.
6. Take your poster board (which will be the backdrop) and cut it to fit perfectly from the upper back of your box to the front of the bottom (don't make a crease in the bottom back corner, just let it naturally curve).
7. Tape the top of the poster board to the top of the box, with as little tape on the board as necessary.
8. Take 2 sheets of tissue paper (one for each side) and tape them over the open sides.

Your box is done!

There are a few things to keep in mind when you're using this homemade photobox:

• Place it near a window for natural lighting, letting the light fall through one of the sides.
• If you're going to use a lamp or flashlight, make sure it's far enough from the tissue paper so it can't cause a fire. (And please turn them off when you walk out of the room, just in case!)
• Turn off your camera's flash, it will ruin the effect of the box!
• You can either shoot from the front opening, getting an eye-level shot of your subject or you can shoot through the top and get an overhead image.
• You can experiment with different backgrounds by using other colored poster boards, patterned scrapbooking paper...if you are artistic you can even paint or draw your own!
• Don't worry about getting your backdrop dirty either, because you can always replace it! (In other words, if you bake and frost cupcakes with your kids, feel free to let them position them inside the box, getting a little frosting on the bottom will just add character to the image!)

Ways to get the best photos of Children

Children can feel one of two ways about the person who always chases them around with the camera at family parties: they can love feeling like the star, strike poses, and fake-smile all day long, or they can avoid eye contact, scream, and/or plop on their bottoms and pout. As a mainly family and portrait photographer during my early years, I got to see some of the extreme children from each category, and let me tell you, neither are any fun. Through all of my photo shoots with children from 3 days to 16 years old, I developed some techniques and styles that help me capture their best moments when they least expect it...all without creating any "enemies" or getting suckered into taking hundreds of photos of "drama queen" poses.

The first thing I learned (and this might actually apply through their teenage years), is not to tell them what to do. I know, you might be thinking, "then how will I ever get a nice picture of them smiling and looking?" Well, my answer to that is that nobody really likes looking at those photos besides maybe the mom or the grandma! Besides, as long as your child goes to school they're guaranteed one yearbook photo per year. What people want to see is your child running, playing, laughing...they want to see the energy and life...the personality. It's very rare to capture a child's personality while they're staring straight at the black machine in your hands while you tell them to smile for no reason at all. The photo above was taken after I had told "Susie" we were done taking pictures for the day. She skipped off to her mom's van, so happy to be done, and when she looked back to see what was taking everyone else so long, I caught my favorite photo from the shoot.

Another trick, besides just letting your child be themselves and being ready to capture their essence in a brief look, is to wait until they're distracted. In the photo above, this little "Becka" wouldn't smile no matter what I tried. Finally, her older sister came over and started making funny faces, and "Becka" started to smile! My point here is not to say that you need funny faces or noises to get good photos of your kids. My point is that your child doesn't have to be looking at the camera for the shot to be beautiful! (If you don't think this shot is beautiful, then disregard this tip...) The photo below of the twins has the same concept. The fact that they aren't looking at me doesn't take anything away from the photo, if anything, it adds more interest. What do you think they were looking at? And do you think their thoughts were the same? We'll never know!

Like the first photo, the one below is of a tired little girl who is sick of her parents telling her to smile and to put this funny wreath on her head. Both of these shots are two of my favorites, and what do you know, they aren't even smiling! My next tip when shooting children is to not delete any photos. Computer hard drives and external hard drives are so inexpensive that there is almost no excuse for not saving every single picture you take of your children. They grow up fast (I know I did all of a sudden), and soon enough they'll be getting married! You're going to want a lot of photos to choose from when you're planning their embarrassing photo slideshow from birth til that very special day! Even the "bad" photos, if there is such a thing, are worth keeping. They will want to look back and see what they looked like when they pouted for not getting to play the arcade game they wanted or when they fell and got hurt. It may sound strange, but, for me at least, photos  serve more than the purpose of just being pretty. They help you remember the way things were.

My next tidbit of advice for shooting children is to not get too close. There are plenty of good photos to be taken from a distance, when they don't even know you're doing it. These two kids were at a wedding, and as you can see, were getting a little bored by the "adult" things going on inside. Even though you can't see the expressions on their faces, you can read their body positions and guess at their movements. Again, it's not always about getting them smiling, but instead, getting them being themselves.

My last tip of the day, is not to focus on getting one particular shot. Keep your mind open. The photo below was one in a series of a bajillion of little "Tommy" and his sisters. He was whiny and fidgety and the girls were getting annoyed and it was showing on their faces. I sat down in front of the bench and gave a huge sigh. "Tommy" thought it was hysterical and made this face...

Priceless! So, as I was saying, if you're trying to take a photo of all of your children together and for some reason its not working, but one of your kids looks better than usual, don't pass up the opportunity! If I hadn't realized how great a shot this would make, I would have missed out and still not have a decent shot of any of them.

If I were you, and had children or siblings that I wanted good photos of, I'd have my camera with me all the time. No matter where we were going...even if its just the weekly trip to the grocery store. Just remember, when they're older, they'll look through them all, and they'll show their boyfriends, girlfriends, fiancées, husband or wife... So don't do it for you, do it for them!

Don't forget the main points!

Don't tell them to smile, sit, stand, anything...

Wait til they're distracted and not looking

Try shooting from a distance

Don't close your mind to other possible photos

Take photos of the good times, the bad times, and the plain ol' regular times

DON'T DELETE ANYTHING.

Shooting Through Glass Without a Glare

As I was going through some of my old photos to figure out another useful tip, I came across a folder from the Shedd Aquarium. I remember when I was little how frustrated I would get when I tried to take a picture of an amazing looking fish, and all I would get was a big, white reflection of the flash. Now it may seem like common knowledge that to solve the problem you have to turn the flash off, but even as you solve that problem, more arise! The new photo might be too dark (especially in an aquarium where lights are kept low anyway) or they might turn out blurry because, like we learned in the last post, the shutter speed is too slow. There's a solution!

First things first, if you have a point-and-shoot digital camera, it's still going to be very difficult to get a good shot. You'll have to turn off the flash and turn the ISO to the highest your camera allows, assuming its incredibly dark. When you do that though, and this happens even with the best of cameras, the photos appear grainy. In a DSLR, this is easier to take care of.

As you can see, this photo was incredibly dark. I had to wait until the sharks came into the one stream of light before I could get a shot I was happy with. Here are the steps:

First, set your camera to manual or shutter priority (S or Tv) mode.

Second, turn off your flash.

Third, set your shutter speed to about 30 (1/30th of a second) and take a test shot. Odds are it will be dark.

Next, bump up your ISO to the highest that your camera can shoot well in. For example, my first DSLR, the Sony a100, could only shoot high quality images when the ISO was less than 600. On my Nikon D700, my maximum ISO is closer to 1200, making it a lot easier to get nice shots in the dark because it allows me to use faster shutter speeds.

Once the ISO is set, take another test photo. If it is still too dark, continue taking shots while slowing the shutter speed. If you start to notice that your photos are getting blurry, you'll have to find something to brace yourself on. In aquariums, there are usually sections of wall between each tank that shut out and have information about the fish on them, lean against that to keep your arms steadier. You can also kneel and brace your shooting arm on your knee if the tank is low enough. Another trick I learned is to take a deep breath and hold it before shooting and tuck your elbows into your sides.

Once you've done all of this, you should be able to get a decent shot!

If you are more comfortable using your camera on manual (M) mode, there is one other possibility other than continually slowing the shutter speed. You can also adjust your aperture (f-stop). In my post on keeping the subject in focus and the rest of the image blurry, I talked about making the aperture number smaller to tighten the focus. Doing that actually has two functions. It also allows more light to enter the lens because the hole that does so gets larger. So if you're a very shaky person, lowering the f-stop will let you use faster shutter speeds! There are lots of lenses that have extremely low apertures. They are generally very expensive, but they give the photography a looooot more leeway in terms of quality, ISO and shutter speeds. But, they aren't necessary.

Your Assignment: Take photos through glass, or at least in places with low lights. Try taking a photo of an animal running through your backyard from inside of your house. Turn off that flash, raise the ISO (but only as much as you have to!), lower the f-stop, and slow down that shutter speed! Once you've mastered glass, try the same techniques in a darker room in your house. You'll be amazed at what your camera can do when it's used on manual mode. You'll never go back to automatic!

(Just kidding...it takes a long time to get so comfortable with manual mode that you can use it all the time...but there are many situations where it's the only way to get the shots you want!)

Showing Motion with a Slow Shutter Speed

Good morning from Chicago! Today's post is about showing motion by slowing down your shutter speeds, something that we see in lots of photos of moving water. Whenever you see smooth running water, like a waterfall or a river with an almost ghostly appearance, it's because the photographer kept the shutter open longer.


A quick lesson on shutter speeds! On your camera's main dial, there is either a Tv or an S mode. Set it here and begin to scroll the horizontal wheel. You'll notice that the number will shrink until it reaches 10 then it will get get quotation marks (") and begin to grow again. That means that you have slowed the shutter speed into staying open for full seconds at a time. Keep in mind, a normal person can shoot at 60 (1/60 of a second) without showing any blur from their own movement; however, when the camera's shutter stays open longer, it is more likely that it will pick up your own movement and your image will be blurry, even if your subject is still. This is where a tripod comes in handy.

Your Assignment: Take a photo that shows smooth motion by using a slow shutter speed. To do this, you'll have to set your shutter speed to stay open at least 1/30 of a second, if not longer depending on how fast your subject is moving. Try it on a running child or animal, they're perfect subjects!

The blue ball was sitting in running water, so as it spun, the light inside moved in random patterns, which I was able to capture with a slow shutter speed!

Making the subject sharp and the rest of the image blurry

When I got my first digital SLR, this is the only 'trick' I wanted to learn how to do because it's one of the easiest ways to make someone think you're an amazing photographer. First things first, for those of you with a point and shoot, don't feel like you can't do any fancy shooting just because of the size. Even the most simple of cameras today has a button for macro mode (usually a little flower symbol) that can pull of a similar effect. For everyone else with the ability to manually adjust your camera settings, it's time for a quick and easy lesson on aperture. 

On your lens you'll see the letter F followed by a number, that's the largest the aperture of your lens can get. It took me forever to wrap my mind around the fact that the smaller that number is, the larger the aperture opening and the tighter the focus. So an aperture of F 2.8 will have only the closest items in focus while the rest of the image is blurry (like the ones above) while an aperture of F 22 is so small that even the most distant objects are in focus. A small aperture (large F number) is usually used for landscape photography when you want to capture even the tiniest details of objects far away (like the one below).

The easiest way to learn is to use the aperture priority setting on your SLR, usually the letter A on the top dial, which allows you to pick the size of the aperture opening while letting the camera decide what shutter speed to use. In case you don't know, you adjust the aperture by using the horizontal wheel either at the front or back of the camera.

Your assignment: Pick an object and take photographs of it from the same distance using aperture priority mode. Start with a small aperture (a large F number) and slowly make it smaller, tightening the focus until you reach the largest aperture your lens is capable of (a small F number). Look at them on a larger screen and notice the differences in how much is in focus.

HAVE FUN!