It ain’t perfect, but it works.  Hit the jump for a DIY guide for your own homemade mini cyc-wall for product photography.

There are times when strobing ain’t easy in Japan.

One of the factors contributing to that is the small size of the apartments here (especially mine).  It’s pretty frustrating trying to set up a lighting scenario inside a puny apartment without putting a stand through a rice-paper door or tripping over cables and stand legs. And don’t even get me started about preventing unwanted spill and bounce with the low ceilings. It usually leads to a lot of four letter words.

Nevertheless, it’s either that or pay for the exorbitant studio fees.  So I decided to put together my own little white cyc-wall for the product photography requests I’ve been getting lately.  The price?  Less than 3000yen. And I bought it all at Tokyu Hands!

One important caveat though – it isn’t perfect.  But it allows me to get the job done with a minimum of four letter words.  Let me walk you through what you need to buy, and how to light it – and you’ll be amazed at how simple it is.

Where to put it:

The thing about Japan – and Tokyo in particular – is that the very large majority of people do not have garages or sheds where they can set up their own DIY studio.  On top of this renting a car-parking space in Tokyo is so expensive that it’s almost worth having a proper studio.  So we’re going to do this in the comfort of our own homes.

The first thing you need to do is find a nice section of wall (or door) that affords you a decent amount of shooting distance (2 metres is about ideal). The colour of the wall is important!! White is best – it’ll reduce the number of four-letter words by half.  Any sort of off-white colour such as ivory works as well.  AVOID violently coloured, highly textured or reflective walls. Especially avoid highly reflective glass sliding doors, which is what I had to resort to in my puny apartment. Needless to say, lots of swearing happens at my house.

Once you’ve found your piece of wall, it’s time to go shopping.

What to buy:

I love Tokyu Hands. Everytime a frenzied burst of DIY motivation claims me, I take myself off to Tokyu Hands to happily drown in all of the weirdness. No matter how esoteric the item, I can always find what I’m looking for.

There are branches in Shibuya, Ginza, Shinjuku and Ikebukuro, but I recommend the store in Shibuya as that’s where I do most of my shopping, and it’s labyrinthine layout can see you lost amongst shelves of weird shit for hours.

Take yourself to floor B1A where the crafts and materials are and head right to the back where the sheets of various materials are stored. Pick out a pair (or maybe three) of decently sized, glossy, flexible and white plastic sheets.  Make sure they’re not too thin, but also make sure they are decently flexible. Click the thumb below for a starting place for where to look. They shouldn’t be more than 700yen each, although sometimes they can be out of stock.  There are other more expensive options there which do essentially the same job so it’s up to you what you get.

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Once you have those it’s up to you whether you decide to buy some black cardboard to use as ‘flags’, or light blockers. Extricate yourself from Tokyu Hands and go home with your new product photography setup.

How to set it up:

Basically, it should look something like the photo on the left once you’re done:

You see the basic premise right?  Put one sheet down on the floor and bend another one so it forms a ramp between the floor and the wall. Bingo! Your very own cyc-wall for product photography.  (In my case I needed a third sheet to prevent the glass door from reflecting in the sheet on the floor).

How to light it:

This is where the four-letter words might start coming out.  You are going to need some lighting equipment here. The good news is most of this can be accomplished with one light.  The bad news is you are going to want an umbrella. That said, it can be done without an umbrella but be prepared to swear a lot.

Let’s start with the settings on your camera.  Put in on manual mode and dial it so you are cutting out all ambient light – in order words, your LCD should show complete black when you take a photo. Be sure to keep within your camera’s flash sync speed while you are doing this(if you don’t know what this is, read Lighting 101 at strobist.com).

Now that you’ve effectively created a dark studio situation within your shooting space, we can begin adding light.

As you can see here I use a huge umbrella to throw light over the whole scene. After a lot of trial and error I’ve found this to be the best solution for creating nice, even light with minimal shadow. Can you use a bare flash for this?  I wouldn’t recommend it.  The bigger the source of the light, the nicer it reflects in the white, shiny background.  Basically we want it to be as smooth as possible so our subject won’t develop nasty specular highlights.

What do you do if you don’t have an umbrella?  There are many workarounds – just use your imagination. Tape some double-stacked tracing paper to a frame made out of wire coat hangers.  Bounce your light off the polystyrene blocks that came with your new fridge yesterday.  The idea is to bounce or shoot your flash through something that will diffuse and spread the light in an even manner.

Once you’ve figured that out, dial your flash up to a point where the subject looks crisp but not blown out.  Parts of the background should be beginning to show blinking highlights but that’s perfectly normal and ideally it should be all blinking. Just make sure you are not blowing the subject out or you will have problems later in post production.

And that’s it! Pretty simple, and as I said it’s not perfect but it serves me pretty well for any products up to the size of a basketball. I mostly use it for flat product photography but there are other subtle variations that it can be used for.

Angling the umbrella can make a noticeable difference in the shadowed areas of the shots, such as in this shot:

There are a couple of other variations that you can do with this mini cycwall, aside from the normal, flat white backgrounds.  Check out the gallery and captions for some details.

Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!

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