My colleague, Tony Troxell, has a blog called Geeking in Indiana with the tagline, “Movies, Tidbits, and General Geekery from Around Indiana.” Tony explains the purpose of his blog here.

I should point out that I used the word “cosplay” in the title of this article, but Tony considers himself to be a “costumer” rather than a “cosplayer.” He explains the difference between the two here. According to Tony, “ ‘Cosplay’ is dressing in a costume and playing the character. You know, Costume + Playing The Character = Cosplay.” But wouldn’t that make just about everyone in the Society for Creative Anachronism cosplayers? In theater or film costumers are often called costume designers and since actors wear wardrobe created by costume designers, are actors cosplayers? I think, then, we can narrow the definition to building (or buying) costumes and playing the characters of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre (including comic books, video games, cartoons, anime, manga, as well as live-action film and television shows). But I digress.

I actually hope to draw your attention to Tony’s post “What is #FeedABlogger?” If you are going to buy something from Amazon, you can help Tony out by going to his blog and clicking thru the Amazon banner ad at the top of his blog page and he’ll get a small commission from every sale. Blogging doesn’t pay very well (for most of us) so any help, I’m sure, is greatly appreciated.

Tony wants to use the money to improve his blog and among these improvements are a better camera and a tabletop lighting studio. Here’s a sample photograph from Tony’s blog:

Source

I can tell you from firsthand experience that I’m usually disappointed with the photo quality of my iPod. On the other hand, I’m used to the poor quality of photography found in scientific and technical papers. Also, when I’m at the book store in the Science and Engineering section, after flipping through some of the DIY Science/Engineering books and looking at the poorly lit, black and white photographs in them, Tony’s sample photo is better than my iPod, and vastly better than the photography found in some of these DIY books. The iPhone that he’s using now should be sufficient until he can get a new camera.

Over the weekend I decided to cobble together a tabletop studio from whatever I could find around the house. I used a mic stand, a large paper pad, and a binder clip:

Here’s a sample photo taken with the iPod using my cobbled together tabletop studio:

I usually use a black background with two 100 watt bulbs in an overhead light fixture, but the photo quality of the iPod is not much better with the white background (but still better than some printed DIY books).

In a previous article I built a tabletop studio out of an old kitty condo that my cats tore up. Here I’ve modified it with a clip-on lamp with a 100 watt light bulb and a piece of thin white cardboard.

The following are some sample pictures. The first is with the lamp shining dead on. The second picture is with the lamp at an angle

The picture quality is poorer than pictures taken with the lamp shining from directly overhead. With the iPod, you really don’t have any control over the brightness, so you can try the lamp at different angles, say, directly overhead, and then experiment with shooting the picture with the iPod at different angles and watch the brightness change on the iPod screen to try to get the best possible shot. Here’s an example:

Meh. Nonetheless, the photo is still better than some of the pictures found in DIY books, and science and engineering papers :)

A better camera may be a good idea, but it might not be necessary to buy a desktop studio since they are fairly easy to build yourself using ordinary household items. Here’s an even simpler DIY tabletop studio.