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Making a Softbox Just Got Easier
If you've been reading DIYP for a while now, you know that I am a fool for home made softboxes.
DIYP has featured all kind of softboxes, ranging from small light weight camera strobe to big studio photography strobes. Some are minutes to build and some are hours. Here is a list of some of the better softboxes we've had here on DIYP:
- The Best Softbox Ever (Image is from this project by Nick Wheeler)
- Two Great Weekend Projects - Striplight and Softbox
- Even Better Softbox Part One - The Build Process
- Even Better Softbox Part Two - The Test Results
- a home grown softbox
- Flash Mounted homemade DIY Softbox
One of the trickier parts of growing a softbox at home is the planning. The delicate work done by professionals to calculate the lengths of segments. The gentle work of trigonometry to calculate the angels. Light-less nights spent in dark basements with calipers.
(Actually it is the drawing of the the
individual pieces before you glue them together that is the real hard task)
No more. Paul Charette and Tim Pasche created a useful tool to help in making a softbox (or striplight) diagram. The first thing you'll need to do is download the tool (it is an Excel sheet). Now here is what you do next:
Once you've downloaded and open the excel you will see five empty yellow cells. Those are the cells you need to fill out in order to get the sizes for each.You can use Inches, Centimeters or Meters as long as you are consistent in all cells.
The top two cells represent the width and length of the diffusing side of the softbox (i.e. the side that you plan to put white cloth on) - this side is also called "the big side". You can make this side as big as the side of your board.
The lower two yellow cells are for the size of the small side - this is where the flash is mounted.
Lastly the bottom cell is for the flash to diffusion distance - this will be the distance that light has to travel from your flash to the middle of the diffusion screen.
What you get in return are the angles between your base and the side of the softbox. This will allow you to draw each piece on a foamboard or plastic sheet, or wood, or any other material that you'll be making your softbox from.
If you forget any of those instructions, don't worry - there is a great illustrated explanation inside the sheet itself.
For example, Let say that I want to build a huge softbox for my Nikon SB800 one meter over one meter and I want this softbox to be one and half meters deep. I will:
- Enter 1 in both the x1 and y1
- Enter 0.07 and 0.05 in x2 and y2
- Enter 1.5 in sotfbox depth.
- I can see that the angles for the individual pieces will be 73.53 and 73.17 (I guess that for practical reasons, I'll cut 73.5 on both).
Have more tricks for building a softbox? Share them in the comments.
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Comments
Increase its effectiveness: prime materials matter.
Lee Soft Silver Reflector
( price-limited to see the sheets, also avail in rolls )
instead of aluminum-foil:
*much* reflectiver,
*and* doesn't react with one's fillings!
and either Quarter Tough Spun, or Quarter Grid Cloth for the front cloth
( less than 1 stop drop )
Lee Quarter Tough Spun
Lee Quarter Grid Cloth
( hm, no-one's got that on sheets, only rolls.. )
good materials
Good materials are always good, and lee is known to make some of the best quality stuff out there.
If you are trying to save, you can always skip the expensive materials and go with aluminum foil as reflective material and silk for diffusion
Instead of using the angles...
Rather than using the angles that the spreadsheet gives you to draw out your pieces, I would recommend that you only use them as supplementary information and instead centre the smaller side line (when you're drawing it out) over the larger side line using the distance set out in the height boxes, and then just connect the ends of the small line (small side) with the ends of the larger line (large side). In this way you don't have to worry about the minute angle differences - if you are making quite a large box, a small error when drawing the angle at the beginning will translate to a larger error the larger your piece is. The image included in the spreadsheet should hopefully make sense of all of this :)
This is a great idea
Thanks Paul. Only after reading your comment, I realized that this is how I created the drawing for the SB 28 softbox. I did the "outer" square first, then drew the beams out to reach the dimensions of the flash.
Of course this will also work great for large scale softboxes. thanks for pointing it.
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