Setting up a simple lightbox for liquidware.com product pictures

Nowadays it seems every major online website or store has clean, carefully taken "professional" photos of their products and gadgets. And for some reason, that tends to mean they're floating in whitespace, with little tiny shadows, and certainly no glare or background noise. Weird.

But I suppose if someone really needed to follow the doctrine, they could do a quick online search like I did, cut out a hollow cardboard box, fill the holes with white card board, and then buy a few Home Depot halogen lights for $15 apiece. And in less than 5 hours, I was able to take all the photos you see on www.liquidware.com!

This was the floor before the lightbox:


This is a small shot of the lightbox only, with no lights set up yet:



When you put something in the box, I think you're supposed to turn it slightly sideways, to look "interesting". At least that's what it looks like on other web sites...



I don't know if there's a science to this, but I bought two halogens to point at the corners, and then I wasn't satisfied because all the pictures came out yellow. I bought a fluorescent workman's bulb, which I used to add white light:



If you turn on all the lights, the inside of the box is *very* bright:



The lightbox even overcomes the brightness of my camera's built in flash: