DIYPhotography.net

If you've been here over that last week, you know that we love ring flashes. In fact we love them so much we made one :)

While we have featured many many strobe based ring flashes, there is one thing they can not do. Shoot video. This is where you would have to go to a continuous light ring lights.

They have a very flattering quality of light. It just because they are usually so big. If an average strobe ring flash is 40 cm across, you can easily build an 8 or 12 bulbs ring light which is a meter across. Which is just what British videographer Rick Clarke did.

The video is packed with useful info both on how this light works and on how you would go building one with a very minimal set of tools.

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Interesting subjects make for great photographs, so are interesting backgrounds. Photographer Karl Zemlin has a great DIY for projecting strobe light to create interesting backgrounds. (He also has a nifty DIY section on his site)

All you would need is a box, a few Fresnel lenses and some textured glass. The main idea is that you could get the texture of the glass projected on a seamless white (or any other smooth) background.

What makes this design really rock is the little tripod socket at the bottom, so you can simply place this behind your subject on a light stand and have a symmetrical background. Click to continue ›

Sometimes you want to add a 1/4" threading to objects that don't have threads. It makes sense. I mean, all the mounting gear is already built to support 1/4" thread: Tripods, light stands, swivels...

This allows you, for example to position a flashlight on a swivel and have full control over it's angle and direction. Or mount a point and shoot on a bicycle handle.

Photographer David Sr. Lapeer showed a smart way of doing this on the DIYP flickr threads: Click to continue ›

Photographer Kevin Thai reminds us that it is more about how you use your lights than how many of them you have.

In what I would call Home Improvement geniousy, Kevin dumps the old concept of cereal snoots and uses cookie boxes. I am not entirely sure that cookie boxes work as good as cereal boxes... but they sre are sweeter.

However the real smarts lies in the careful positioning of two foam based reflector cards.

And it just so happens that Kevin documented the entire thing with an iPhone set overhead for our viewing pleasure.

Now turn your speakers on, sit back and enjoy the show. Click to continue ›

A shot while back I featured a post called 21 Photographs And Lighting Setups For Every Occasion. Not surprisingly the post featured a collection of amazing photographs along with a snap of the setup that was used to capture those photographs.

So... what's up with all those photographers taking setup pictures with no artistic value whatsoever. gotta be a reason for that, right? Right. Click to continue ›

What did you built for you studio this weekend? A backdrop mount? A Light Stand? A ghetto glamor contraption?

A dolly....?

If you are one of those PVC dudes (no shame in it. I am a PVC dude), you're bound to appreciate this little PVC trick that makes binding pipes a snap. (pun completely intended).

Flickr user mr-quad share a great way to make any PVC studio construction quick to setup and quick to tear down. Click to continue ›

After seeing some very creative use of strip lighting here, on the Strobist site and Flickr, often as 'rim' lighting, I thought "If only I had that fancy gear, my stuff would look as good as Joel Grimes' stuff!" I had visions of after-shoot champagne lunches with Heidi Klune and groups of graceful models in a spacious studio populated with Broncolor and Hasselblad stuff - RIGHT!

[Editors note: The excellent intro and tutorial were made by John Hagar (flickr), we are trying to keep it family friendly, so no beer by default...]. Click to continue ›

Making a 3D display of an object is a great way to display merchandise on line, so this tut would be very relevant to any product or still life photographers.

The usual way of making a 3D display is to put your item on a turn table. The less common way, yet sometime more effective (wit shoes for example) is to suspend the object from a rig. In the following tutorial, Photographer Matt Devlin (Flickr) walks us trough the a build of a 360 deg rig. Matt says (and I heartedly agree that this is a very simple rig to build - 3/10). Click to continue ›