Large foldable still photo box

Fans of home sub­ject pho­tog­ra­phy, as well as review­ers who are not indif­fer­ent to the result­ing pho­to­graph­ic mate­r­i­al, are con­stant­ly faced with the prob­lem of poor light­ing. Of course, there is noth­ing bet­ter than nat­ur­al light, but it is far from always pos­si­ble, espe­cial­ly in the autumn-win­ter peri­od (when the day­light hours are short and it is often cloudy), to have time to take good pho­tos. A pho­to­box can help. I will tell about one vari­ant of such a thing in this review.

House­hold (if I may say so) pho­to box­es come in dif­fer­ent sizes and the larg­er they are, the larg­er objects you can pho­to­graph in it, and when shoot­ing in a wide for­mat, for exam­ple 16: 9, in small pho­to box­es you need to be very tricky so that the lens does not its side walls got hit, so desk­top spec­i­mens with a side length of 30–40cm are suit­able for very small items. In this regard, I decid­ed to order a fold­ing pho­to box with the stat­ed dimen­sions of 60x60x60cm.

The goods arrived in a thick card­board box:

The set is quite rich:

The com­po­si­tion includes:

• pho­to­box
• case
• two lamps with pow­er sup­plies
• four back­grounds
• instruc­tion
• car­ry­ing bag

The main ele­ment of the kit is hid­den in a nylon case, the weight of which, togeth­er with the con­tents, is about 800g.:

The pho­to­box inside the case is twist­ed in a tricky way:

The frame­work con­sists of flex­i­ble spring met­al racks. Hav­ing unfold­ed the struc­ture, fold­ing it back is anoth­er idea. The instruc­tion tells about this process with a very vague info­graph­ic:

After the first turn, we get a square, and then a cube:

As a result, a dou­ble-walled frame box is formed, the out­er part of which is made of black nylon (like the fab­ric on umbrel­las), and the inner part is foil film:

Visu­al­ly, the design looks rather clum­sy, but here the appear­ance does not mat­ter, the main thing is the func­tion­al­i­ty. The front wall has two zip­pers on the sides, allow­ing it to be unfas­tened or, on the con­trary, com­plete­ly closed:

In addi­tion to this, there is a Vel­cro tape run­ning along the upper part, which ensures com­plete clo­sure of the pho­to­box. It is impor­tant to keep it closed so that dust does not get inside when not in use:

In addi­tion, in the front “door” there is an oval hole 28x21cm, closed with sep­a­rate Vel­cro flaps, through which you can shoot with­out open­ing the zip­per:

On the top wall, there is also a hole with a diam­e­ter of 14 cm, which is closed by the same valve:

Inside the box, every­thing is well stitched, all the walls are made of reflec­tive fab­ric:

The mea­sured length of each side is 65cm, which is even more than 60cm declared on the prod­uct page:

Light­ing ele­ments are two LED lamps:

Each of them has 96 COB LEDs:

The LEDs are cov­ered with a trans­par­ent over­lay. In the lamps, on the sides, there is a swiv­el mount, but in this pho­to­box mod­el it is not used, because. it’s quite bud­get friend­ly. Here, the lamps are fas­tened to the body using sim­ple sewn-on rub­ber bands; in more expen­sive mod­els, guide brack­ets are pro­vid­ed along which the lamps can be moved:

Lamp size:

Lamps are con­nect­ed to pow­er sup­plies through a round con­nec­tor, the wire is pulled through spe­cial­ly pro­vid­ed holes in the design of the pho­to­box:

12V pow­er sup­plies are equipped with a smooth bright­ness con­trol, the length of the pow­er cable is 112cm, and from the unit to the lamp 114cm:

When switched on, the green LED is on:

The max­i­mum pow­er of each lamp is about 19W, which is more than enough for such a vol­ume of box­ing:

The kit comes with four col­ored fab­ric pho­to­back­grounds: black, white, blue and green. Vel­cro tape is sewn on one short side, which is fixed on the same tape spe­cial­ly locat­ed at the top of the back wall inside the pho­to­box:

The back­grounds come wrin­kled, of course, but are per­fect­ly smoothed out with an iron and have two sides mat­te and glossy. Size: 60×114cm, edge trimmed with thread:

At max­i­mum, the lamps shine very bright­ly, there is enough light for any shoot­ing. Lumen col­or 5500K (between nat­ur­al and cold):

When they work at full bright­ness, the top wall of the pho­to­box in the place where they are adja­cent to it heats up a lit­tle more than 47 ° C:

In order to be able to visu­al­ize the dimen­sions of the pho­to­box, I placed a 3D print­er in it:

As for the pho­tog­ra­phy itself, it is quite con­ve­nient to car­ry it out both with a com­plete­ly open wall and through both holes on the top and side. We attach the back­ground to Vel­cro and smooth out the wrin­kles:

Pho­to exam­ples:

On dark back­grounds, it is most dif­fi­cult to achieve the absence of dust, which must either be care­ful­ly removed or post-processed already in a graph­ics edi­tor:

It is more inter­est­ing to shoot some objects (for exam­ple, light­ing devices) either with min­i­mal light­ing of pho­to­box lamps, or with­out it at all:

The light reflect­ed from the mir­rored side walls allows you to elim­i­nate shad­ows, but can give the effect of addi­tion­al “col­or­ing” of the object of the pho­to shoot, to elim­i­nate it, you need to close the walls, for exam­ple, with mat­te paper:

In addi­tion to the com­plete ones, of course, you can use any oth­er pho­to­phones, for exam­ple, dou­ble-sided, which I talked about in this review (sold here)

After spend­ing some time on their loca­tion, we achieve good shots with good light:

In gen­er­al, the pho­to­box is very wor­thy, despite its exter­nal unpre­ten­tious­ness 🙂 The lamps are pow­er­ful and bright, they have smooth adjust­ment. The design itself is light and strong enough, does not shake from the slight­est breath. The kit comes with dif­fer­ent back­grounds, for the first time you can get by with only them. The biggest advan­tage is the size of the pho­to box (at a very afford­able price), as well as the abil­i­ty to fold it into a com­pact form. Bought here