After the October Webelos Weekend, I had 40 lbs of pasta left over that was the property of Bucks County Council.  I brought it to roundtable with no takers, posted it to Facebook with no takers, and send out a few emails with no takers.  Not wanting to throw it away, I brought the bags up to camp in their industrial packaging and standardized cardboard box like any pasta for institutional use would be packaged and left it near the kitchen door of the dining hall.  It was gone the next morning and didn’t appear to be any of the trash cans.  This is the one time I’ll thank OSR for their thrift.

I wanted a light box to take some pimp product shots for stuff to post on eBay and Craigslist and looked into getting a light box, a photography tool to give a nice shot of stationary objects.  Kits can be purchased for $60 or so but wanting to save money I considered my options and did the most reasonable thing: Called Teejay Green to see if I could borrow his.   After getting childishly impatient I attempted to make one using a cardboard box and tissue paper and created something that looked like a hobo Helen Keller doing paper mache in a dumpster.  I threw out that attempt and created a new one using a pillow case and a slightly bigger cardboard box lined with paper.  This one looked like a box that decided to dress as an inside-out refrigerator and also met a swift garbage death.  Finally, I decided to drop the half-ass work and picked up nice foam board, good paper for a back drop, a nice cutting tool and real tissue paper as a diffuser. The results weren’t quite where I wanted them so I sprung for some extra light bulbs and desk lamps.

Total cost of my “cheaper” option: $65.00.  A full negative five dollars cheaper than the commercial option.