Photography is awesome and I love it, but it’s super expensive sometimes. Photographers often commiserate with one another about the high price tags on tripods and ball heads (or sometimes they gloat, but the nice ones commiserate), and if you get into studio photography you are often getting into a whole new world of expenses from strobes and stands to backdrops and gels.

Now, it definitely pays off to have the right tools for the job, and that starts to become glaringly apparent when you’re doing work with people, but for so-called tabletop product photography you can often get by with some home improvement supplies and a little ingenuity and patience.

After the break, the resident product photographer and editor at Handmadeology shares a $12 product studio setup that yielded the image on the right.

Handmadeology is a blog owned by Tim Adam, a metalcrafts guy who started selling on the Etsy marketplace and wanted to share his tips and ideas with the Internet at large. Handmadeology is very focused on items to be found on Etsy and ideas for improving your sales through Etsy, but this particular post by contributing writer Mariano definitely overlaps into Single-Serving Photo territory.

Using a window, some paper, cardboard, a simple clamp, and aluminum foil, Mariano can get a very clean seamless image that you might think was taken in a cloud dome.html/BI/1816/KBID/2457 or using one of those infinity boards Check out the link below to read Mariano’s full article and see how it was done.

Studio Quality Product Photography with a $12 Setup via Handmadeology