Always the guy to delay personal projects in favor of office work and/or procrastination, building a lightbox was in the pipeline for the better part of a year now.

I finally kicked myself in the rear during the christmas vacation, and with fatherly help (tool supplier), built the thing in about two days. More details and some pretty resulting pictures after the jump.

The unassembled box

Below you can see what the box looks like when taken appart. The idea was to have something i can disassemble for easier storage. It’s still quite big though as it basically consists of two planks 24″x16″ each.

A piano hinge keeps both planks together. I initially screwed every holes but it created too much interference when closed. So i got rid of half of them, keeping an empty hole opposite to every screw.

The assembly

You might have noticed in the first picture a bunch of aluminum bars, those are 90 degrees 1″ angles. They play the structural role of holding everything together. The plastic part below is what holds those bars in place, there is one at every corner of the planks.

So the process here is to put every angle in its appropriate plastic receiver, as you can see in the next few pictures.

The interchangeable back round

I wanted my lightbox to accomodate any color of back round. So i came with the idea of using velcro. I’ve glued (and tacked) one long stripe on each end of the box, this way it can hold either fabric, a rounded cardboard, or just about anything i want, in any color.

Just sew the soft velcro side on the fabric (that was done by my sister in all fairness), and apply to the back panel.

Cover and lighting

A white fabric piece makes up the top and side walls of the lightbox, allowing light to pass through.

I’ve also bought two cheapish lamps (identical) that have the nice feature of being totally poseable thanks to a fully articulated neck.

The finished product

The end result

To conlude, i present you some of the pictures i took using my new lightbox. You can also visit my Flickr page if you’d like to see all of them.