I was documenting some Arduino projects and I came into a problem that I can't take good photos! my projects always have a lot of wires,jumpers and reflective surfaces like LCD screen so my photos always have horrible shadows that I can't get rid of even when I used Photoshop. So I consulted some of my friends who have the experience in photography and they all said that I have to make a mini studio.

The idea of a mini studio or box of light that you make a closed box and diffuse the light into it through a diffusion material so you can get equal quantity of light in your photos and get rid of reflections,shadows... etc.

So I made this mini studio with the help of my boyfriend Mahmoud Kotb

Step 1: Collecting the Materials That You Want

You will not have to buy a lot of things as you will find most of the materials already in your home :

1- box ( any size according to what you want) I used a shampoo box :D

2- cutter

3- glue

4- meter or ruler

5- paper clips

6- some nails and nuts

7- diffusion material ( I used calc paper)

8- wooden sheet

9- any kind of thick white paper ( I used 150 gm Canson paper)

10 - (two lamps, wire , lamp base and a plug) if you will construct your own light system but you can simply buy two desk lamps.

Step 2: Construct the Box

1- Bring the box and cut 1 side so you have a box with only 5 sides.

2- Leave about 3 cm on each edge and cut the rest so that you have a hollow side.

3- Repeat the previous step on 2 more sides.

4- Glue the diffusion material on the 3 hollow sides.

5- Cut 2 pieces of white paper and cover the edges inside the box.

6- Cut two small holes from the upper side so that you can mount the paper clips

7- Mount a sheet of paper using the clips and make it as curvy as you can so that you don't have any inner edges that will reflect light and ruin your photos.

see! it's very simple only 7 steps

Step 3: Construct the Lighting System

1- Bring a wooden sheet.

2- draw two holes on two opposite sides of the sheet.

3- mount the lampp bases using the nails and nuts.

4- connect the electrical circuit as shown in the picture.

Step 4: The Result: After and Before

Without using the light box you will find the photo contains a lot of shadows and light spots but after using the light box the photo looks very good to me. May be you will need a little bit edit on the photo brightness using any photo editor.

I took some random images of things around me to show the results

Enjoy your mini studio :)