DIYPhotography.net

I am not really sure how this one went under the radar, but late is better than never. The fine folks over at Indy Mogul came up with a tutorial on building an 800 Watt video light that relies on our good old friend the Compact Florescent Lightbulb (A.K.A CFL).

The nice thing about this light is that it does not really get warm. And if you ever tried lighting a video with an 750 Watts worth of halogen lighting, you know how hard it is to manage. Click to continue ›

LED technology is currently developing at a rapid rate and in this article we look at how you can utilize the latest LED technology to light your images until the photographic lighting industry catches up. See how for under £20 you can make a portable, rechargeable light that can produce results like this in a totally dark room:

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One thing that make Hollywood light what they are is the fact that they are huge. Huge light equals soft flattering glamorous light.

Sadly, huge lights have their price and getting a big pro kinoflo kit may set you back a good $3K or so.

But how about using cheap worklights bounced of a huge reflector and diffused by a bed sheet? This is exactly what Matthew Scott did for as little as $55.

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Have you tried dong any project that requires 100W incandescent bulbs lately? Light a set maybe? or build a huge ring light perhaps?

If you went to home depot lately and looked for some 100W or even 75W bulbs you are probably out of luck. Those light were a huge hit as a cheap and very available light source. They had a pretty constant light temperature (incandescent, duh:) and they were cheap and available. Cheap enough that you never needed to carry them from place to place and could have just bought some on location. Click to continue ›

A while back I shared a post about three ways to skin a cat to bare bulb a strobe, one of which was Ryan Mangondaya's excellent mod for the quad-sync LumoPro 160. Since than those strobes have been discontinued and I am now eagerly awaiting the LP180 replacement. But still if you care for having a go on this with one of your units Ryan put up a guide on this mod. Of course, with the 160 being discontinued and the 180 not announced yet, don't come crying if you nuke your strobe dead. Or if you buzz your self to death handling a stripped strobe. Those capacitor inside can deliver an unhealthy a healthy jolt is handled incorrectly. There, this was our standard warning, consider yourself warned. It's all Ryan after the jump.

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DIYP reader Florian Knorn just sent in this really rare footage of a Sony HVL-F58AM Flash gun shot with a super fast 500,000 frames per second Fastcam SA4.

The SA4 is usually used to study ballistics and explosions, but Florian turned it on a strobe, playing a 500,000 movie at 25 FPS - an X20,000 reduction in speed. Actually, he did it twice, once that shows the strobe firing at 1/32 power with HSS on, and one that shows the same power shot with HSS off. The videos and my thoughts after the jump. Click to continue ›

In today's tutorials Matus Zošák explains how to build a varying power LED Ring light.

While the concept of using LED angel lights to make a ring flash is not new. This design adds a few important tweaks to this hack - power control, on/off switch and a clever way to mount the ring to a lens.

Photographer Boon Vong shared an interesting tip with us today about using LED ceiling lighting panels to light portraits.

Boon told us that, The product is one of many led light fixtures that are manufactured in China. As far as I know they are sold wholesale in large quantities to resellers here in America that would want to outfit offices with these power saving lights Click to continue ›

"There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there is more than one way to bare bulb your strobe". (Udi Tirosh, 2013).

Most hot shoe strobes have a fundamental difference from monoblocks or other "studio strobes".

Studio strobes are "bare bulb" which means that the light they emit goes everywhere. Most (if not all) hot shoe strobes are directional, meaning that most of the light they emit goes forward.

Where you think about it, it makes sense. Hot shoe strobes are primarily used on camera (well, at least originally) and the main point of putting them on camera is to light distant subjects. This is why they are built to throw as much light forward. Even if today many photographers use them off camera, they are still designed and built mainly for throwing light forward.

The front of a hot shoe strobe has to be "bullet proof" as they are usually tossed in the bag, hence a plastic enclosure. Try throwing a studio flash in your bag, the unprotected xenon tube would break in a heart beat.

Studio strobes on the other hand, are almost never used without a modifier. To throw the light forward, you place a reflector on the head. But having the light go all ways makes them far more versatile when it comes to other light shaping tools like softboxes, beauty dishes, and actually anything that needs a wider dispersion of light.

This difference between hot shoe strobes and studio strobes can be a bummer for off camera flashers. Almost every modifier (maybe snoot and grid excluded) benefit from having a bare bulb flash.

Here are 3 different approaches for barebulbing a hot shoe strobe. Going from least efficient to most efficient, and from dumb-proof to please don't do this unless you are a certified electrician. Click to continue ›

Swedish photographer Sven Hedin was not happy with the flash his the Nikon 1 V1. specifically the proprietary hotshoe mount (and he is not the first one to dislike that).

As any hacker would do he fitted his camera with a shiny new Flashbulb mechanism. Yea, bulb as in old press flashes where you exchange the bulb.

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