DIYPhotography.net

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 ›

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 ›

I love strobes, anyone who reads this blog knows it. But more and more I find myself attracted to the lure of continuous light. No pop blinks, no need for modeling light, and pupils are smaller. Kirk Tuck has a post about continuous lights with LEDs. Similar, not as intense but way cheaper solution is using CFL bulbs for lighting.

In the following post photographer Tony Zeh will walk us through building a CFL driven Westcott Spiderlite TD3 Backlight Kit. This backlight is part of his CFL based studio - check the last picture for more info about that. Click to continue ›

when I was your age we used to squint/half squint to measure light!

OK, I am not that old. Actually my father didn't even take photographs beyond the average vacation on the beach photo.

Yet, there are times when you have to calculate exposure manually, or even harder, calculate flash settings. Mixing flash and ambient is no rocket science - to quote a certain DH. However, it seems that one of the issues that is hard on everyone is when to start in terms of aperture, shutter speed and flash output.

Photographer Domjan Svilkovic came up with a nifty little card that can help you do just that using the ultra highly modifiable yet super cheap YN460 strobe. I would go and say that it may be considered a printable flash meter. Seems that the low price is driving those to be very popular.

The card and instructions after the jump. Click to continue ›

Sometimes, a small softbox would not do it. You just need a bigger light. The thing is that bigger modifiers eat more light up. This a guest post by Edward Peters will show how he dealt with building a large softbox, including building a double flash bracket, mounting two strobes and syncing a pop for up to five strobes using a headphone splitter.

My Wife needed photos of a jewelry piece she had created, but the piece was too big for my favorite 13x13 inch DIY speedlite soft box.

Unfortunately for us, the jewelry has entered a contest and cannot be displayed on the web. However, the good news are that I can share the making of the mega-dual-light softbox that took the image. Click to continue ›

In this tutorial I will explain how I built the softbox used to take the image on the left. It is a 40cm X 40cm foamboard softbox that accepts a strobe. Kinda similar in size and effect to the Photoflex LiteDome XS which I use a lot out of the studio.

On the left image this softbox was used as key, see this lighting setup for another use of the softbox as fill.

It is a simple softbox to make and it takes about half an hour if you have mediocre cutting skills. Click to continue ›

The cardboard light tent is a constantly popular post here at DIYP, and no wonder it is one of the easiest ways for shoot a small product [note to self, make a really huge cardboard tent].

However, it is not the only way to create good small scale product setups. A while back David Hobby had a great derivative of that box which he titled the lunch box.

Photographer Steve Bennett uses a similar concept to create a table top sized diffusion screen with built in spill control. Click to continue ›

After reading David Hobby's post about rim lights, I decided that I wanna have a go myself.

In spite of David Advice, I went with strip lights. Made from an electrical racer. I did push them a bit more then on that post though.

Since I was not using a real "store bought" strip light I wanted to see how far I could push the light down the racer in a way that still produces good light through the diffusion screen. (Or actually, up the racer, since my flash was set on the bottom).

I placed the flash on the bottom of the racer and popped a few shots. I got nice blow out up to about 70cm. So that was the length of the strip light. From here the build starts. Click to continue ›

UPDATE: Looks like Kurbster droped out of flickr taking the very excellent set of strobist studio with him. I am going to leave the post here as the text still has value, although the images were soooooo much better to understand the concept from.

Just spent some good amount of time over at Kurbster photo stream. Seems like he completely nailed the whole, turn-a-room-into-a-strobist-studio thing.

Kurbster challenged Home Depot classic departments and generously turned some cheap and ordinary items into studio elements.

I'm gonna go over some of the challenges that Kurbster so elegantly solved.

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 ›