Create big light from small flashes with a Chinese Lantern paper lamp shade

Speedlights often go hand in hand with shooting portraits on the street, especially at night, but small flashes have one big issue. Due to their size, they often give very hard, harsh and unflattering light, especially if you’re forced to use one on the hotshoe.

After being asked to photograph a night time outdoor music event, and wanting the minimise the risk to expensive equipment, photographer Tom Simone came up with a DIY solution to help make that light a little bigger and provide a more pleasing look with help from a Chinese paper lantern lampshade.

You could use one on a light stand off-camera with a small softbox or umbrella, but they’re not the friendliest of modifiers outdoors if there’s a bit of a breeze blowing, explains Tom.

This is where the Chinese paper lantern lampshades step in. Being spherical in shape, they’re ideally suited to helping avoid the breeze. Yes they’ll still catch a little wind, but when you don’t have big flat sides like a softbox, or a concave sail like with an umbrella, they’re much less susceptible than the alternatives.

But “out of the box” they’re not particularly suitable for this kind of a purpose, and need some slight enhancements.

The first step is to cut out a couple of pieces of aluminum foil.

One piece covers half of the inside of the sphere.

The other seals the hole in the top, preventing big chunks of light from escaping, and between them, they help to bounce all of the light being expelled from the flash forward, and towards your subject.

The speedlight is then placed inside, facing towards the back foil providing a more even diffusion and spread of light, and to help avoid hotspots.

It might not be the best looking modifier for high end weddings, but for only a couple of dollars it’s a great DIY alternative to more expensive alternatives like the Impact Smoothy 360 Degree Glove Diffuser (and a lot easier to eat the cost if it dies a horrible death out on the streets).