DIYPhotography.net

Reader Michael Lim (zac08) came up with a cool snooted flood light. It combines the concept of a home made snoot with a clamp. The design is similar to a mixup of both, but uses a florescent light instead of a flash.

The bonus here that there is almost no assembly/DIY-ing required; it comes ready from the shop. As for hacking the right materials, the snoot used is a Lay's Potato Chips pack. (Empty of course, lighting is tasty). Here is what Zac has to say; Click to continue ›

Reader B.Stevens has a cool idea for the cheapest most versatile ring light ever (now we have shown some ringlights before, but not that easy to make). The image on the left is using this ringlight (best viewed large). The idea is quite simple: Take a huge apple monitor. If you can get your hands on a 24 incher, you are on the right track. Tape some patterned paper on the monitor. Bring your 1.8 or 2.8 lens and your 1600ISO low noise camera and you are good to go. HEYTHEREWAITAMINUTE you said cheap. So, let me go through this method step by step and see where you can reduce your costs. Click to continue ›

This post on a 2 cents macro studio got me thinking. Firstly because it is a great idea, it employs the same technique as the super simple light tent and the flash diffuser. Secondly it is cheap. So cheap in fact, that it really does only cost two cents. The thing that I was thinking is - "I want a BLT Sub", and right after "This is great for small objects, what if I want to shoot something bigger? For this I came up with an improvement - The Origami Macro Studio. It is not as cheap - approximately 20 times more expensive - but for 40 cents, it is still a heck f a deal. And as the macro studio, it is cheap, takes 2 minutes to prepare, and very simple. Click to continue ›

Do you know why they call this piece of studio equipment "Beauty Dish"? Because it make people look beautiful. The idea is similar to other diffusion ideas - the more diffusion you put in your light, the softer the image is. This idea is widely deployed in photography studios - the softbox, the beauty dishes and the reflector disc all work on close principles.

The unique thing about a Beauty Dish is the way that it diffuses light - unlike a softbox or a reflector which has an "illuminating" surface the beauty dish has a circle of light with an opaque center. Now, what all this has to do with soup. You will soon find out. Click to continue ›

Ok, So you've got your DIY Flash/Strobe working. Now you want to evolve to a full DIY studio - Here are some uses for the flash unit (again, courtesy of Avner Richard). In this article you will find some creative ueses for the basic circuit - Multipe flahs heads and controling output power - as well as some basic studio flash setups - beauty dish, spot light, soft box, ring light and more. Click to continue ›

The following article was contributed by Avner Richard, not only a great photgrapher, but also an electronic wizard.

Studio strobes are quite expensive, especially when dealing with high power strobes, or multiple heads - the power pack solution.

In this article I’ll present my strobe power pack project, which is an easy DIY electric project. Click to continue ›

In this article Aron Brand will demonstrate how, using homemade and accessible materials, you can improve the light quality of a simple slave flash, and get a natural and soft light. This sort of light is good for jewelry photography, shooting items for eBay and portraits. Note the picture at the end of this article, not only showing softer shadows, but also pops the look of the metal, giving it more polished, expensive look. Similar methods to obtain the same effect can be a light tent, of a flash mounted softbox. Good luck. Click to continue ›