Using a Milk Jug Light Tent for Coin Photos

Light Tents

There are all sorts of light tents promoted on eBay for product photography, including expandable fabric cubes, enclosed boxes and even a "coin dome" specifically for coin sellers. Call them what you will, each is nothing more than a way to completely surround an object with a translucent light diffusing material, providing soft light from all sides of an item. Some commercial light tents cost $100 or more. Thankfully, you can make a very good light tent for coin photos for the price of a gallon of milk. And, you get to drink the milk!

The Milk Jug Light Tent

Creating a light tent from a milk jug requires nothing more than a clean, empty milk jug and a sharp knife or scissors. You simply cut off the bottom of the jug to the desired height, place it over your subject, light it evenly and shoot through the neck of the jug. If the neck is too small for your camera lens, you cut that off to make the hole large enough. Here is one of these modified milk jugs in use on my copy stand...



I cut this jug down only slightly, but you could easily make a few milk jug light tents of different heights to match the focusing distances needed for various sizes of coins. For even more light diffusion, you could use a white orange juice jug.

In the photo above, I've shown the milk jug illuminated by only one light, but it is more common to use two lights, with one on either side. This surrounding lighing creates the most even effect. The photo below was shot through the milk jug with one strong light on the left side and a weaker light on the right side..



As you can see, this produces a very soft light which brings out the surface of the coin well. However, a light tent also results in a lower contrast image, with less definition between the brightest and darkest areas. This in turn leads to a loss of fine detail in raised design elements. Small nicks and scratches are also less prominent.