As a professional photographer & author of photography education site, I’m a self confessed lighting freak...my favourite light is called a ring light which give a wonderful shadow less glow. I’ve got one I imported for the studio and another one for my DSLR camera and for less than £10 I’ve just built one for my phone....let me show you how.
If you are using multiple strobes as a strobank (yes, strobank is a word) you may have stumbled on the issue of triggering. Triggering one strobe is one thing, but triggering a hole bank is a bit more challenging.
The naive way to do it is to try and use a trigger splitter, in a similar way to a headphone splitter. This will probably work with 2, maybe 3 strobes, but what if you have 6 strobes or more lined up? You should just split it into 6 right? wrong. Most triggers just not enough juice in them to close the circuit on more than two strobes. So for six strobes it would take 3 slaves. Click to continue ›
Photographer Benjamin Von Wong recently shot a hair dressing competition. Unlike the usual portable beauty setup which is comprised of a softbox or octabox and a few cards to bounce lights into the models face.
Ben took an interesting approach and used a set of homemade florescent fixtures from office depot. Interestingly he placed them all vertically to create some interesting catch lights (yes, florescent tubes make interesting catch lights) . The light produces was good enough for shooting at F5.6 over 1/125 @ISO 400 quite shallow. Hit the jump for the BTS video. and click the bottom link for full info and lighting diagrams.
One of the things with using traditional strobes and lightstands is the way that it limits you in space. This is why when I saw Christopher Park's photographs I was immediately intrigued by his lighting setup that uses raw florescent tubes.
Christopher uses an array of florescents connected together via a single wire that goes to the power source, so they can be be re-arranged to fit any lighting scheme. That also makes them very portable and moveable into any shape and configuration. Lastly, they only have one wire coming off one end rather than off each end of the light so they are easy to power. (And YES!, the catchlights are wicked!).
I am not going to show the lighting setups today. Instead, I am going to post a few more photographs at the end, see if you can reverse engineer the position of the lights.
Ring lights have a very specific light signature. Mostly it is connected with fashion photography as it gives out a very flattering light. The light is coming from around the lens, but since it is symmetrical it seems as if the light is coming right from the center of the lens.
Small strobe powered ring lights can be used for stills but if you want something really impressive, you would go with a huge wooden bulb-driven ring light. While those are a bit harder to transport, they give out a spectacular light that can also be used for video.
(Oh, and make sure to check out those crazy catch lights at the sample pictures at the end of the post!) Click to continue ›
Benjamin Von Wong over at the VonWongBlog shared a creative tool that we immediately loved! Using Black Lights and a mystery fluid he was able to capture a futuristic-Tron-like self portrait.
OK, it was not a mystery fluid, just office markers, and while painting office markers on your body may seem kinda dull, magic happens once you turn off the every-day-boring-florescent-lights and kick in the super-cool-magic-black-lights. Watch the video with Ben's explanation after the jump. Click to continue ›
Who said that hi-end lighting equipment has to be expensive?
And who says the only way to shoot with fluorescent light is to use the flicker-free kino-flo lights that can cost you thousands of dollars?
I began using this fluorescent lighting technique nearly 10 years ago, long before kino-flo’s and Peter Hurley became popular. I have been asked to describe it so many times that I decided it was time to put together a few tutorials to show how to build it and how to use it.
In this article, I am going to deal with the “how-to use” the fluorescent studio lights. Jump to the end and you will find a video and parts list that will help you build your own set-up for less than four hundred dollars. Click to continue ›
Here is an interesting concept from Eric Ferguson. Eric took a roll of flexible LED strips and wrapped it on a can which he attached to an umbrella.
The nice thing about this mod is that unlike DIY LED strip light, you don't need to cut the LED into strips. This means it that this project requires no soldering, making it a quicka nd easy project to get the full power of a 600 LED strip.
I can see two obvious cool factors here:
1. A typical roll of 12v LED is usually 2 Amps, just right for the average power convertor for just about any gadget that you already have somewhere around the house.
2. This would probably be a great on-location light with a 12V battery.
, As much as I love the idea of light light in an umbrella, I think I am going to love it even more in a modifier that is has the light a bit more controlled for spill, like an Apollo softbox.
[via CheesyCam] Click to continue ›
While there are plenty of wireless triggers around, the most fail-safe way of triggering a strobe is still by using a sync cord. Alas, not all strobes come equipped with a sync jack (pc, or 1/8).
Marcell, A.K.A Fiberstrobe came up with a way to add a sync chord to any strobe that has an optical slave. In his case it was everybody's lovable hackable strobe - the YN-460II. It synched wonderfully indoors but failed to fire under strong sun.
The YN460 does not have a PC or a 1/8 jack so actually an optical sync is the only solution if you are unwilling to add an external hot-shoe.
But, they don't call him fiberstrobe for nothing. Using Velcro, cardboard and foamies, Marcell created an optical sync wire that works on light rather than closing an electrical circuit.
![Portable "Kino Flo" Setup Explained](http://www.diyphotography.net/files/images/5/DIY_BuildDiagram_small.jpg "Portable "Kino Flo" Setup Explained")
About a week ago we shared a sweet little video by Tristan Shea Penner showing the flattering results made with a DIY setup similar to Peter Hurley's Kino Flo setup.
While the video showed the awesome photographs that resulted from using the setup, you needed a sharp eye to hunt the different build parts and schematics scattered around the video. We asked for it and here it is. Tristan shared the build diagram. Click to continue ›
