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Message: <blockquote data-quote="STM" data-source="post: 114427" data-attributes="member: 12827">Glad it helped! Mine is 31" all the way around. I chose this because my diffusion material is a plain white twin sized bedsheet folded in half and sewn together. It is also big enough to photograph most things. The nice thing about PVC is you can take it apart and it stores in very little space. I have the 90 degree unions glued to one piece of pipe only. My total expenditure, including the bedsheet, was less than $25. Compare and contrast that to a much smaller commercial light tent that can go for $100. Macrophotography can be very equipment intensive but it does not HAVE to be. You will need a good sturdy tripod and a macro lens. Primes are exceedingly better than zooms in my opinion because they are designed with that specific task in mind. You might consider getting an older manual focus Micro Nikkor. The 55mm f/2.8 (especially) and f/3.5 Micro Nikkors are superb lenses and can be found used (like on "Fleabay") for very reasonable prices. Since you are using DX, their effective focal length will be longer which gives you more camera to subject distance.  Autofocus is not a good idea with macro in my opinion because the depth of field is so shallow at times that if the camera focuses on what it thinks is right, there is a very good liklihood it will NOT be what you want to focus on. Of course autofocus camera focusing screens are not the best for manual focusing which is why, since I only have AI and AIS Nikkors, I changed the focusing screen in my D700 to a microprism one.</blockquote>

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