SB800 Internals
As you may know, I am involved with a secret project. For this secret project I needed dots, plenty of dots.
My first thought was to punch some holes in a black Bristol and cover the flash up. Then (I naively thought) I'd get a nice projection of spots on the adjacent wall. Right? Wrong!
What I did get was an effect you may recognize from another DIY photography project: the pinhole camera.
Bummed out due to lack of dots, I decided to record the event and make a shot explanation.
Here is the setup shot
On the left corner (in black pants) we have my beloved snooted SB800. On the right corner, we have our challenger, a pinhole. And I tell you this guy's small - 1.5mm.
The light from the flash tube go through the pinhole and hit the wall creating a pattern exactly opposite to the shape of the flashtube internals. AS with a pinhole camera, the small hole acts as a lens. (And considering the amount of light the SB800 pours, it does not have to work hard.
Is the image blurry? yes. Can we see all the details? no. But you can clearly see the internal reflectors. It was a fun experiment though and I wonder how much more details one can get by making a smaller hole. Click here to see the pattern supersized.
As a nice side effect we see the Honl strap and snoot in action. The snoot is actually rolled with the black side into control light spillage as much as we can.
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Comments
There is another way to see this effect
Just the other day I build an extreme flash extender (click the link to my blog to see it) which is able to amplify the inner part of the flash, it makes it much more visible than your pinhole version without losing any leaking light. The best is: it costs just $3US to make :)
Juergen
NICE!
This is definitelly a super snoot :)
There is actually a product that does a similar thing the Better Beamer. it costs about 10 time your kit :)
Judging from the photos in
Judging from the photos in the previous post you did succeed in getting your pin points of light.
But just for fun, what if you had a big piece of card and punched the holes in that, with the flash on the other side from the camera. You wouldn't get dots projected on the wall, you'd get a background with lots of dots. You'd probably need a diffusing layer against the holy card. If you gelled the flash you'd get one color.
If you stuck colored cellophane over each hole rather than a single gel on the flash you could get lots of different colors.
While I'm at it, is the secret project a mount to hold stencils in front of the lens of a camera, and a bunch of stencils of useful Bokeh shapes?
re: dots
yap indeed, I used a cheapo LED chain from dealextreme. (I plan to re-use it on our next in house party:)
The thing is that I'm gonna need a huge fabric/card to get all the dots I want.
I love the gel idea. I have such "spear" muslin, I am going to see if I can make my kids "have fun" punching the backdrop :)
I would guess what you need
I would guess what you need is not a hole but a tube with a diameter of 1.5mm - similarly to why a longer snoot will create less spill. Maybe if you strip the insulation off of some cable, you could use the insulation bit(s) you cut off?
Projecting dots
To project dots of light, you need a light source that is capable of focusing the light, like an ETC Source 4 or a Strand Leko. If you don't need it super bright, you might be able to make do with an overhead projector, or a slide projector. Since this is DIY Photography, you could try rigging any lens in front of any light source and see what happens.
re: projection
@Katrin - This is an interesting idea. If the problem was not solved with LED already, I'd go for it, only using some fiber optic wires. I bet it would have gotten me some nice dots.
@Josh Thanks for this idea. Using a slide projector definitely opens up a ton of new possibilities. (and hey, I even have slides from "old times") to actually show.
Slide Projector
A buddy of mine, Mario Peralta, has experimented with using a slide projector. He made custom slides in Adobe Illustrator and had them printed out as slides.
He used anything ranging from dots to grids to concentric circles and did studies of nude figures. Everything is pitch black except for the contours provided by the lines.
Here are a couple of links to his work. I'm not sure if the direct image link on Facebook will work or not, so I'll post to his fan page as well.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1460031&id=37556847794
http://www.facebook.com/mario.peralta.photography (if you go to Photos, then Self-Portraits, it'll be the one of a grid pattern on his face)
Finally, he has some images up on OneModelPlace.
These are actual nude photos, as a fair warning.
If you scroll through his work to the "Fine Art Nude" area, the 4 images just above the "Glamour" section are done using this method.
http://www.onemodelplace.com/member.cfm?P_ID=170661
Hope that helps you get some insight.
Photons and pin holes
For an absorbing but bewildering explanation of the bizarre and unexpected behavior of light, I direct your attention to the tiny tome titled: "QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" by Richard P. Feynman. One of the brightest theoretical physicists of the last 100 years, Mr. Feynman's greatest gift was, perhaps, his remarkable ability to present impossibly complex subjects (like quantum electrodynamics...QED) in ways that even boneheads like myself could fathom. The behavior of photons going through pinholes is especially entertaining, and explains nicely why shining a light through a hole will never give you a spot of light on the wall.
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