All you need for product photography on the budget is 1 (one) main light and 1 (one) background light. If you want to go fancy, two background lights will be better. Obviously, hard lighting is a bad choice, so you have to find a cheap and safe (this is important) way to soften that main light of yours. The cheapest alternative would be to bounce the light from a white non-flammable panel like drywall or something. All ancillary lights that you ever need in product photography can be substituted by small cardboard reflectors with white or silver surface. It takes ten minutes to make one by glueing a piece of white paper or wrinkled kitchen foil to a rectangular A4-sized piece of cardboard and attach a little triangular piece of cardboard to a back of the rectangle at 90 degrees to make it stable in an upright and slightly tilted back position. You will actually need at least three of these reflectors, but if you are not lazy to make an extra one and paint it matte black (or glue a piece of black velvet to it), you will have a great tool for blocking light that you do not need.
The background light (or lights) should be used not to though light on the background, but rather to shine through it. Just but the light behind your white roll, and there you have a glowing base. If you use two lights and put one behind the background and another on under it vertically, you will have two glowingspots that can be colored by inserting appropriate gels between the lights and the background.



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