Let's Shed a Little Light on the Subject

So...as you've seen me mention a few times in older posts, the lighting in my house after dark is uber crappy for photos - especially my kitchen. It's just plain embarrassing. I vowed to do something about it - you know, trying to actually blog during daylight hours instead of jamming things down on the screen before crashing into bed in the wee hours of the morning. But...we all know that will never change. 10pm will always be my "happy time" for blogging. Because it's QUIET around here.

That's why I'm glad that there is Pinterest and that Michele over at The Scrap Shoppe came to my rescue. If you've never seen Michele's blog...well, you should. She's super crafty. She posted a tutorial for making your own home light box out of a cardboard box. Brilliant!

So while I can't promise that all my photos from here on out will be pretty and less tainted by my incandescent lighting, I think there is some hope in the future that there will be improvement.

I followed Michele's instructions (kind of loosely here and there, because I'm lazy like that) and made my light box in about thirty minutes. You can get the whole thing over at Michele's blog, but here's the basics of what I did. (Oh, and her photos are prettier.)

First, I swiped a box from work. It's about a 13x13" box. I wanted that size because ideally I want to be able to eventually take glare free photos of the scrap layouts I can't scan. Ya...we'll see...

Using my handy dandy box cutter, I chopped off the flaps.

Then I drew a rectangle on three of the sides, leaving about an inch of cardboard around the edges. Wielding the box cutter again, I cut out each of these rectangles, leaving one side and the bottom of the box intact. At that point, it looked like this:

After that, I dug out some white fabric to shield the sides. I ended up using what I'm pretty sure was a twin bed sheet from my college dorm room. I have no idea how that ended up in my fabric pile, but whatever, it totally worked. I just chopped a long 14" wide strip of fabric (long enough to cover the three sides).

This is where I start to deviate wildly from Michele. Hers is nice and pretty. I figured no one was going to see it but me so I took a short cut. Instead of cutting the fabric to individually cover the holes, I just wrapped it around and taped the edges down to the cardboard. I will eventually need to add some white posterboard or cardstock to the exposed inside edges, but for now...here's what I've got.

I tested it out a little bit last night using my little desk light through the top panel and I'm happy to say that my pages came out relatively glare free (I removed the white posterboard to slide them into the back of the box). I need to work on my angle so the edges come out straight, but the lighting is much improved. Fingers crossed for better project pictures from here forward!