Makeshift Photo Booth

Most of you will wonder why I'm posting this, but lately I've become a bit of a photography geek so I'm excited about what I just did this afternoon.

I needed to get some better pictures of some of our products to use on our website and in advertisements, after getting frustrated by the poor lighting for product photography at our shop. So I went to Walgreen's and picked up a piece of posterboard ($0.89) and a 2-pack of CFL light bulbs ($5.99) and slapped together a very amateur photo studio.

We have some clamp-on lights that we use in our tent at events, so I stuck the CFLs in those and used random junk we had lying around the warehouse to rig up some mounts. The clamp-on lights already had good bulbs in them, but the whole reason I used the CFLs is because they had their color temperature stamped on the packaging. Knowing the bulbs' color temperature really helped me narrow down the settings on my camera to get the proper white balance, which is key to accurate color in your digital pictures.

I had to put some objects around the posterboard in order to block some of the nasty blue light coming in from the window. I can't wait to try this out at night when there's less interference from ambient light.