⊕i’ve been intending to document my considerable canned coffee can collection for a while now. it would be an excellent comfy indoor winter project, if it wasn’t for the fact that the dismal seasonal sunlight and sickly indoor lights make for poor photographs. then, i remembered some old guides i had seen about how to make a diy lightbox out of an old cardboard box.

i discussed the idea earlier with a friend who knows marginally more about photography and he said to just buy a cheap lightbox off amazon, where there are plenty available under those nauseating nonsense generic brand names used by the countless chinese sellers that seem to be rapidly taking over the platform. instead, i continued undeterred, and immediately ran into difficulties.

first off: the tissue issue. apparently you need some kind of thin transparent paper to diffuse the light into the box, like tissue paper. i really didn’t feel like going all the way out to some art store just for one thing, so i was ready to give up right then and there until it occurred to me, if it’s called TISSUE paper then maybe i can just use some regular tissues, like kleenexes. but first i had to test it with my light source, which i still had not found. every guide recommended lamps, bright white ones especially, however i went through the whole house and somehow found not one single usable lamp. i was ready to call it yet again, before remembering the extremely bright flashlight my mom had purchased to hunt for backyard burglars. i tested shining it through a kleenex and it seemed to work pretty well, so i pretty much had everything i needed to get to work.

⊕the lightbox guides i found were originally intended for taking pictures of figures and i happen to have a figure holding a canned coffee, so i also took this photowhen it was all done, it looked pretty good. shining the flashlight through the tissue at the top really did light up the inside of the box with a soft, smooth, even white light. then i realized it would be very difficult to hold the flashlight in place above the box while also working the camera in front of the box to take pictures. i also couldn’t rest the flashlight on anything, because the bulb had to be facing down unobstructed. the obvious solution was to hang it from something, namely the clothes-hanging rod in my closet. naturally i didn’t have any string or rope, but i was really getting into the swing of improvising by this point, so before long i had tied the flashlight up with an old ethernet cord i had on hand.

from the outside the whole setup looks outrageously janky, and i certainly had my doubts going in. then i got the camera out and started using it, and it was almost exactly what i had originally wanted: a nice little studio in which i could take clean crisp coffee can pictures. truly this is the essence of suboptimalism.