Background information

An almost perfect softbox for beginners

23.3.2018

Translation: machine translated

It's easy to build a near-perfect softbox with just a few tools. Even with your smartphone, you'll get photos of impressive quality.

You don't need much for your box. Often, the materials you have at home will suffice. For our project, we used a cardboard box, greaseproof paper, white paper and adhesive tape. Our little jewel came into being after 30 minutes of DIY. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for taking your first steps into product photography.

You can also paint the brown areas of the cardboard with a white spray.

Lighting

Use the light you have available. Whether it's a floor lamp, bedside lamp or desk lamp: these light sources are enough for a first experiment. The greaseproof paper stuck to the "windows" of the box acts as a filter. The harsh, direct light becomes softer, a bit like in a softbox. A little bonus: the greaseproof paper is heat resistant.
Although I had to laugh when I read Dominik's 'One perfect Shot' article, he summed it up perfectly. He tried to do the best he could with what he had. For me, photography is also about improvisation, tinkering and learning to always improve.

Background information
One Perfect Shot: The story of how I rearranged my flat to get a photo
by Dominik Bärlocher

Hey Dominik Bärlocher, your photo isn't bad at all, but are you capitulating or already planning to do a "The perfect Shot 2.0"?

Let's get back to the project. Here we're using three desk lamps that were lying around. Grab whatever you can get your hands on. The only thing you need to make sure of is that all the bulbs have the same colour temperature. In our case, this is 2700 Kelvins.

An almost perfect photo studio, isn't it?

Photographing with the smartphone

For the production of digitec campaign subjects, we normally use high-resolution SLR cameras. But, in this project, we decided to take a smartphone. Manuel lent me his Honor 9, worth around CHF 400. It doesn't matter whether you use a smartphone, a compact or a professional camera; the photos will succeed best in manual mode and, if possible, in RAW format.

Smartphones

Honor 9

64 GB, Glacier Grey, 5.15", Hybrid Dual SIM, 4G

Camera settings: ISO 100, aperture f/2.2, shutter speed 1/200 second, white balance 2800K (2700K was not possible).

Ici, un papier noir a été utilisé pour bloquer la lumière.

The result

The following photos were taken with the Honor 9, and in post-processing the brightness, sharpness and contrast were tweaked slightly. Manuel and I were amazed. On the smartphone screen, the photos are nice and sharp. It's only when you look closer or print the photo on a large format that you see that this is a smartphone camera.