A commercial photo light box can cost over $100 or more. If you are on a budget, you can build your own with a few simple supplies you can purchase almost anywhere for $5.00 or less and you can build it in about ten minutes without any particular skills.

One of the most critical aspects of selling online is your photos. It is an absolute must to have professional quality, well lit photos without distracting backgrounds if you expect to sell your products online. 

In most instances, the advice of expert photographers is to use a plain white background, unless you are photographing something that is white and won’t show up on a white background. 

Since online shoppers can’t pick up your products, you should take pictures from every angle, plus closeups of important details. This can get expensive to hire a professional photographer to do them for you if you have many products you want to sell.

One of the best ways to get good pictures of small items is to use a photo light box. But commercial photo light boxes can cost $100 or more. You can build this DIY photo lightbox in ten to fifteen minutes, with less than $5.00 worth of materials.

Step 1: Buy a sturdy cardboard box that is big enough to hold the items you want to photograph, or get a free box from one of  your local grocery or furniture stores.

Step 2: Buy a package of white tissue paper (around $1.00) and 1-2 sheets of white poster board, depending on how big your box is (another dollar or two). You’ll also need a roll of tape (masking tape, scotch tape, or packing tape – around $1 to $2). You’ll also need a box cutter or kitchen knife and a ruler or yardstick to keep your lines straight.

Step 3: Cut all but an inch out of three sides of the box using the ruler as a guide to run your box cutter along. Also cut out one end of the box. Your photo box should now look like the picture at right.

Step 4: Cut the white poster board to the width of your box and line back and bottom of the box. If you can, cut it to fit all in one piece with a curve where the back of the box joins the bottom of the box. If you are building a really big box, you may need to join two sheets together with clear tape.

The join line will show in your photos, but don’t worry, you can remove the line in your photo editing program later.

Step 5: Tape tissue paper to sides and top of the box. Your DIY Photo Light Box is now done.

Just add light sources on sides and/or above the box as needed to create a diffuse light that will shine through the tissue paper. I use inexpensive shop clamp lights or cheap goose necked desk lamps. Both are easy to position at just the right angle you need your light coming from. A 9 volt flashlight will also work.

For larger items, you can build a frame out of 1″ PVC pipe and use muslin material or an old white sheet to cover the frame.

Take your pictures at the highest resolution allowed by your camera and take pictures from every angle. Not every picture is going to turn out perfect in one go, so take more photos than you need, so you can pick out the best ones. You can use your image program to size them smaller if you need to later. Crop the box out of the finished pictures, leaving just the white background.