A long while back David Hobby did a double duty assignment where he asked participants to use a single light source to perform several lighting function. A huge deal later I saw a great video from Jim Talkinton about using mirrors as a way of expanding a light source and became obsessed with it.

In this post, I will share my experience with creating a setup that only uses one very cheap work light on a stick-in-a-can and lots of mirrors from a Dollar store (or Amazon). The premise is that you can light well on the cheap. Mucho strobismo.

Here is the fun bit, lighting for this setup only costs about $10. The step by step is right after the jump.

The resulting image is on the top of this post. We'll get back to it, but first, lest see what we started with. Click to continue ›

A while back we had a piece about the power of using LEDs in photography. In that article we had a very primitive LED ring light. In this guest post, Tim Brook shares a much better way to create a LED ring light.

Browsing through the dealextreme website, I came across these LED car headlight rings and thought that they’d be ideal for making a Macro Lighting Ring so I placed my order and had a go. Click to continue ›

Multi flash mounts are cool. I have discussed them before when we did a DIY on a dual flash mount. Just a quick recap: Using multiple flashed allows you to either drive more light or to remain on the same light level, while recycling faster. You can read it all here.

Using some objects that my wife will call junk elements smartly scattered around the house, photographer Brent Pennington made a three-way flash mount. Ha! Three is better than two. It will drive a stop and a half more.

As a bonus, Brent's device relives you of the need to use a stud on your swivel. That's a major bonus if you are like me and keep losing them. Kudos.

Of course, you could always sin and get the one made by Lastolite, but then where would all the fun (and your 70 greens) would be?

Read the entire tutorial and deep thoughts on Brent's Blog. Click to continue ›

Optical Slaves are the simplest (and cheapest for the most part) method for using off camera flashes.

The principle is simple, when the optical slave sees another flash fire, it fires too. Kinda like yawning. Once one of goes, it is catchy.

Of course optical slaves have their limitations, one of which is that they are too dump to understand the difference between a flash and a pre-flash. There are a few more limitations to optical dumb slaves, but this post is about overcoming the pre-flash issue with a cool gizmo called Arduino. Click to continue ›

Chase Jarvis is a photographer I really love following. Heck, if he ever counted his mentions on this blog, he'd probably call the stalking police.

Chase's latest installment is a cool video about his latest joy trip assignment to New Zealand where he shot a campaign for Sandisk.

A small treasure of goodies came out from that ride (check here for videos, BTSs, Gear talk and more), but in this post, I'd like to focus on the last video. The one where Chase shoots a rapid-hell-fire-8-FPS-strobed-ski sequences.

Ok, I'm gonna take my chances and try not to sound like a third grade
teacher when I'll say - This video is not about gear, it's not about
technique it's about homework. More after the jump

Click to continue ›

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!

Click to continue ›

You know how you never have enough lights to do the shot you want? Today I am going to solve this problem once and for all. I'm going to show you how to get all the light sources in the world for just a few bucks. How? With LEDs.

Lighting with LEDs is a ton of fun. It is also a great way to practice lighting. Why? Because LEDs are cheap. Having a ton of LEDs allows you to position a huge amount of light sources on any miniature detail oriented given setup - Provided that the setup is small enough.

Click to continue ›

Did anybody say obsessed?

OK, I'll admit it. Over the last month or so, I've been obsessing with home studio tweaks - backgrounds and seamless whites in particular. No wonder too. I'm about to enter my own kids place space studio in about a month now.

This setup has been around for over a year on the web. I can't believe it went under the radar. It's cheap, quick to build and kill and best of all it is continuous, so it is also good for video A-LA matrix style.

Click to continue ›

My gift to you readers for DIYP 3rd Year Aniversarry - 43 Photography Hacks, Mods And DIY Projects. (And some shameless self promotion)

Light Modifiers

1. Homemade Speedlite "Snoot"

2. The Best Softbox Ever

3. Using A Cooling Honeycomb As A DIY Gridspot

4. The DIY Speed Strap

5. The DIY Speed Strap - Accessories And Samples

6. Kimel’s Pop Up Flash Soft Box Diffuser

7. Drinking Beer - Out! Snooting - In!

8. Striplight and Softbox

9. Gel Holder for Flash

10. V Cards

Click to continue ›

Don't we all love to make Lighting diagrams? They help us explain our lighting setups. They can also help us design a setup in advance.

UPDATE 3: The The Lighting Diagram Creator now supports export to jpeg. Man, Huy has really done great work with this one, It even allows adding sound gear.

UPDATE2: Lets try and make the online diagram creator complete. read on for making a stamp on the history of online lighting diagrams tools.

UPDATE1: Due to licensing issues the tool has been revised to use Don Gianatti PSD file - It is still a great way to create lighting diagrams online.

In the past I have written about a great PSD file created by Kevin Kertz. This PSD file allows you to describe (almost) any lighting setup you create. I have used this excellent method myself in Shooting The Team series.

There are other lighting diagrams creating tools out there, but none was as complete as Kevin's. The only drawback to the PSD file is that you had to install Photoshop or The GIMP to use the file (yap, PSD is Adobe's Photoshop native format).

Click to continue ›