One advantage to commercially available light tents is their ability to collapse for compact storage.

If you're using your light tent for profitable activities (e.g., online auctions and sales), you should strong consider dumping the homemade kit for the professional solution.

Light tents are pretty cheap these days.

Deprong Mori

I've seen this, and built this, a long time ago. I have since moved on to a little bit more expensive, but equally cheap lightbox and small product photography setup. I went to walmart, got a big clear plastic bin, a white sheet, and two desk lamps (on sale for 5 bucks each!), and a bunch of poster boards, in all different colors...I used velcro, you can use tape, but, using that box setup, you can change backgrounds quickly, it wont fall apart like with the box, and, toss everything into a bin and it's portable!

DemolitionMan

My husband is an amateur freelance photographer and he used a setup just like this for awhile. He got different colored craft-foam (the very thin kind) and attached a velcro set-up so he could swap out background colors. He received a little collapsible light box for Christmas so we tossed the old one, but it served him well while he had it.

thewildboo

My boyfriend (pro photographer) used to use an Ikea laundry hamper -- the one made of translucent white plastic, hung on a folding metal frame. It worked quite well -- and he could also use it to put his dirty laundry in!

He did upgrade to a real light tent, eventually -- and yes, the main advantage is that the real one collapses for storage.

snowmentality

Seems like a great idea for anyone wanting to take some clean pictures but aren't sure how much it will actually be used.

Myles

Here is a shot I did about two months ago, white paper backdrop, one studio strobe with softbox to camera right and a speedlight on camera left, positioned behind the headphones and set to 1/2 power.

isolated headphones on white

The shadow to camera left makes this item, even on white, have some kind of depth. I also shot this about about f/5.6 to give some depth of field, you'll note, while hard to see in the small image, that the plug end is slightly out of focus. This adds a bit of depth to the image and shows that it is behind the headphones, again, not just floating in space.

The use of shadows and aperture settings helped to give this image some weight and feeling to it.

Mike Panic

These things will work, or you can buy an EZcube off eBay for around $50 that folds up - either way you need to throw a LOT of light through them. I'd suggest 500w work lights on either side, maybe a 3rd from the top if possible. Downside to using them is the color is horrible and they get hot, really really hot.

For those who are looking to do this, a custom white balance is a must, otherwise whites will not look white. I'd also suggest skipping fabric for a backdrop inside the cube and using some white thin posterboard cut to fit.

The downside to this type of setup is there is no true way to isolate objects. To really achieve properly isolated images you need to set a strobe on the background and over-expose it by one to two full stops, then use 2 more strobes, one at camera right and left. Ideally, you want some sort of shadow too, even if it's just a small one - otherwise items look too artificial.

Mike Panic

I'm aware that it's not LH's fault that DPS plagiarizes, but Strobist had the same freaking article a year before DPS did.

[strobist.blogspot.com]

It really gets my goat when blogs don't give correct credit to appropriate sources.

balls187