Now i’m no professional photographer, but some other people are.

I came across a blog late last year called

Strobist to the rescue! Check out David’s how to article on DIY $10 Macro Photo studio.

I created a similar setup last year to play around with, here’s what I came up with.

And here’s a few photos taken using this setup:

There’s also a follow up article on Strobist suggesting some improvements to DIY Macro Studio.

Of course, I had to try this out myself. So I did, and here’s one of my results:

My setup differs a bit, but uses many of those ideas. Rather than using a reflective black tile, I use a black piece of cardboard on the base of my lightbox and found a 2mm thick piece of plastic to place on top of that.

What the plastic does is create a reflective surface, and the black piece of paper underneath the plastic creates my “shiny” reflective black surface. My only issue is that the plastic is bigger than the base of the box, and I found that it gives me a funky reflection on my background as you can see in the top left of the following photo.

For the background, I’ve placed a single A4 sheet of blue paper.

You might think it’d be a weird look, a black surface with a blue background, but you’d be wrong. What happens is whatever colour your background is, that will be the colour of your surface. The black shiny surface basically acts a bit like a mirror and will reflect both your subject, as well as the background.

Change the background regularly, surprise yourself and goodluck!