Light Boxes

Light boxes, or light panels as they’re also known, have a huge number of creative applications. Providing solid and consistent illumination across a flat surface, they can be greatly useful for drawing, embossing, animating, tracing or other similar tasks. As far as photographers are concerned, light boxes can be particularly useful for working with film, as they’re a great way to view slides, transparencies or negatives.

If you have a large number of analogue images to catalogue or digitise, light boxes for photography can be extremely helpful in sorting through them. Providing powerful constant illumination from LEDs, light boxes produce plenty of light without consuming too much power or generating too much heat. The light is designed to be evenly distributed across the entire area of the panel, resulting in smooth, constant illumination. While they’re not as powerful as dedicated LED light panels for studios, a light box could also be a useful source of extra illumination for lighting a shot, especially if you’re working with food, products or other smaller subjects.

Many light boxes are optimised to produce daylight-balanced light, with a colour temperature of around 5000-5600 Kelvin. This is an excellent asset for photographers, as it ensures neutral colours in slides or negatives. There are also a number of accessories available for light boxes, such as film holders, which can make it easier to use them for analogue photography applications.

If you’re planning on using a light box for artistic applications such as technical drawing, animating or tracing, then you may want to consider which size you need. The boxes tend to come in dimensions corresponding to standard paper sizes – A4, A3 and A2, for instance – and so, if you typically use a specific size of paper for drawing or other artwork, it’s a good idea to get a box that corresponds to it.

It’s also worth weighing up the merits of drawing area versus portability; a larger surface area is always handy, but you may prefer a smaller light panel that you can easily slip into a bag for working on the go. The good news is that light panels tend to be ultra slim – the smaller ones can be just millimetres thick – so you won’t have any problem slipping them into a bag’s standard laptop sleeve or similar opening.

For technical drawing work, some boxes have useful ruler scales along the horizontal and vertical edges. This can be particularly handy for students in fields like architecture or product design, where it’s important for drawings to be consistently to scale. Light boxes are usually powered via standard UK mains plugs, so you’ll need a socket available to plug yours in. The good news is that the LEDs tend to be rated for long life – more than 10,000 hours is common, and some are rated for 50,000 hours and beyond.

While light boxes can be laid flat on a desk, you may also want to consider mounting one on a stand, as this can allow for a more comfortable working posture.