You all know how important great photographs are for selling products, right? But how easy is it to get those great pics in the real time daily life workings of the solo entrepreneur?
Enter, the Foldio2 by OrangeMonkie!
A second generation Kickstarter portable lightbox studio made to optimize photographs taken with your smartphone. (I use an iPhone 5s) I backed the crowd sourced project back in December 2014, and waited for my trip to the States this summer to pick it up in my stack of accumulating mail.
Foldio2 with green back drop.
Got back to India yesterday, and today, after a bit of over indulgent jet lag sleeping, pulled my Foldio2 out of the shipping wrapper and popped it up.
Even with limited instructions, it was pretty easy to set up (it has magnets that hold it all together), although, I would have appreciated more guidance. The box is 15 x 15 inches.
It come with four different back drops – white, green, grey and black.
Here’s one of my very first experimental photos.
First photo, unedited
I was immediately disappointed because I could still see that greyish background. Maybe with a little work and adjustments, I could have over come this.
Trying to get more info on how the whole thing works, I came across the app that OrangeMonkie had developed to work along with the box. (For Android and iOS systems.)
So I downloaded it from the Apple store and started playing around with it. Right away, I liked the whiteness of the background obtained without any effort or knowledge on my part.
Photo with Foldio App
Wow!!! See the difference?! This is what I was after! And good thing the app just did it for me, because, once again, there is not a lot of info about this system and app on the internet, probably because it is so darn new. (I love being a pioneer!)
And then, there were some hints floating around on Google searches that you could super impose different backgrounds with the app. Well, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the ChromaKey to work on the app, and no amount of searching brought up any helpful information. Then it dawned on me, I needed to use the “green screen” to super impose backgrounds.
Add a super imposed background
And yes, that worked! I still need to work on item color adjustments using the green screen, but after less than an hour, from pulling out of the box, to downloading the app, to figuring out the green screen importance, I’m well on my way to loving this box!