I thought I would tell you about a recent purchase. I read about the foldio on a blog (sorry, I don’t remember which) a while back. The blogger had backed their Kickstarter and had just received their reward. The foldio is a small portable light box made of plastic which is foldable (hence the name) and is held up with magnets. It is designed for people to take nice photos of small objects with their cell phones. So, I checked out the the website and the manufacturer, Orangemonkie had begun selling them with free postage at the time. I decided to give it a go. As you may have seen on an earlier post, my light box is a sad operation right now and I’m looking for something to take its’ place.
I paid $59 US for my unit, which worked out to about $65 CDN. As you can see from the photos above, the unit folds into quite a small package. The foldio is only about 1” thick and comes with a flimsy little travel pocket. Assembling the foldio is a bit confusing as at first, as there are lots of tabs and you have to have the magnets lined up just right in order for it to stand up properly. The unit, once assembled is about 10” square on the inside. I opted for the model with two strips of LED lights. The lights are located at the top of the unit and the light bounces around the inside to light the subject, so I figured more was better. I was right. In a nice touch, the 9V batteries that power the LED strips will hang from the side magnets which keeps them out of the way.
I decided to take a few pictures of my newly painted Mage Hunter Strike Force UA. I figured I should show it off as it is the only thing that has come out of the hobby cave in a good long while. Anyway, here is a picture taken with my cell phone.
The picture is not bad and is much better than the usual blurry and out of focus cell phone picture we see posted on Twitter. I decided to see what I could accomplish with my DSLR. I set up the tripod and played a bit with the settings. This is what I managed straight from the camera with no post processing. The unit comes with a white, grey and black backdrops. I tried one with the black background and kind of liked the look. The backdrops are actually just sheets of coloured foam you can get at the dollar store. So, it will be pretty easy to get lots of different colours for a very reasonable price.
I ran into trouble when I tried to photograph the entire unit. The number of models was difficult to fit nicely into the available space. I also had a tough time finding the right depth of field (keeping all of the models in focus) and not catching the sides of the box. I don’t know if this would be much of a problem with a phone as they are usually set to take a much wider angle shot with a deeper depth of field. I finally did it, but it took several tries. I also don’t like the positioning, but my options were very limited.
Finally, here are the pictures I took with some post processing in Lightroom.
I think that the foldio would be a great purchase for those that want to take quality pictures of their miniatures with their phones or point and shoot cameras. You can be taking pictures within a couple of minutes, the foldio is so easy to set up (once you figure it out). If you like to tweet out your pictures or put them up on Facebook, I think the foldio is a nice purchase. It also takes up a miniscule amount of space when folded up, and not much when unfolded either. I wish more people had the foldio so we could be spared the wretched photos that rarely do justice to all of the work many people put into their beloved miniatures. I would definitely pony up the extra $10 for the extra strip of LEDs. More light is better if you are using your phone. If you want to look into getting your own foldio, you can follow this link to Orangemonkie’s web site. I see they are still offering free shipping to anywhere.
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