Low Budget Shooting: Do It Yourself Solutions to Professional Photo Gear

For the person with more time than money this book provides specific low-cost methods to make your own ancillary photography equipment. That being said, I should point out that the projects focus almost entirely on lighting and include softboxes, reflectors, and diffusers. In addition, most of the projects are focused on tabletop photography needs. That does not mean that they cannot be applied in other types of photography and I found that with some minor adaptations some of them were useful to my style of outdoor photography. What I found particularly useful was the fact that so many of them could be adapted to be a truly light-weight and highly portable solution to my outdoor needs. Low Budget Shooting has some very creative ideas for those on a low budget that can help you produce professional quality photography and is a highly recommended read.

The ideas are great and workable, using materials that are easily available in any medium size town, plus there are some nice basic pointers for those who are new to photographic lighting.

I have been searching all over the internet for some good do-it-yourself projects for photography and browsing in the bookstore, I found this and it's exactly what I've been looking for. This shows you how to make light tables, soft-boxes, build reflectors, diffusers and light tents. It's a very simple book on necessary solutions especially if you do close-up or macro photography. If you sell items online and want to showcase your items for top dollar, this will provide you with ways to photograph that item to look great!

Low Budget Shooting is the latest in no-nonsense books from the people at Rocky Nook. Filled with full color images and very easy to follow instructions, Low Budget Shooting will show you how to create studio and lighting equipment at a low budget price. As I said in my full review on Blogcritics.org, you will learn how to build a light cube, reflectors, diffusers, a flash mounted diffuser frame, softboxes, strip-lights, close-up diffuser and a light brush. Each item has a list of materials and great pictures that not only show you how it is built, but wonderful photographs that show the kind of pictures that can be created with this equipment. Even if you are not on a budget, Low Budget Shooting will provide plenty of new techniques and ideas to enhance your photography.

When I requested a review copy of Low Budget Shooting: Do It Yourself Solutions to Professional Photo Gear by German photographer and designer Cyrill Harnischmacher, I was hoping to see something useful. I was first taken aback by the thinness of the volume - 72 pages with a hardback cover and paper thickness that only seemed to emphasize the lack of wider content. And yet when I flipped through, I realized that the $19.95 price was something a photographer could recoup multiple times in a single project. Just learning to create a custom soft box out of maybe $10 or $20 worth of material - without needing much in the way of skills or tools - is a money saver. You can learn to pretty easily make reflectors of all sizes, diffusers for a hand-held flash unit, even a table with continuous background for shooting products. There seems to be a bias toward table-top and close-up work, but the techniques he suggests are actually a jumping-off point. For example, you could adapt the soft box construction to a studio flash, or even series of flashes, or create large area reflectors using thin PVC pipes instead of fiberglass tubing. If you have the slightest inclination toward do-it-yourself projects, then this will give you great suggestions for building and improvising a lot of your own equipment without going broke in the process.