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Make your own DIY UV ring light for less than $20

No matter if you’re a professional or just like to play and experiment with the camera, blacklight photography opens up tons of new possibilities. If you’d like to try it out without breaking the bank, this tutorial from Eva Landry will show you how to transform your regular ring light into a blacklight ring light.

This project seems like lots of fun, it doesn’t require a lot of time to make, and it’s insanely affordable. The material will cost you less than $20, and a store-bought UV ring light costs over $200. So if you’re willing to give blacklight photography a shot, this can be a good start.

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Build your own 3D printed DIY LED ringlight for your smartphone

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The problem with mobile phones is that if you need lights, you’ve usually got two options. The first is to simply deal with the underpowered, far-too-close-to-the-lens built in LED. Unless you’re using in the front camera, in which case that’s usually not an option. The second is to lug around all the usual LED lighting gear you’d use with regular cameras. In which case, you probably might as well just use a regular camera.

The folks over at Adafruit, though, have come up with a great project to help solve this. A 3D printed smartphone case with a built in LED ringlight. Not only does it wrap the light around your lens instead of being right next to it, but it also offers a fair bit more power. That it’s controlled by an Arduino also means that you can reconfigure the lights to give some neat effects.

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How to build your own heart and star shaped DIY ringlights

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It’s December. So it’s safe to talk about Christmas now, right? While the technique isn’t specifically related to Christmas, these videos obviously are. The music kinda gives it away. In this pair of videos, YouTuber Eva Landry builds up two DIY ringlights from scratch. One in the shape of a heart, the other a star.

The construction is pretty straightforward using only cardboard, tinfoil, a string of Christmas lights and some gaffer tape. For a quick build, though, they seem to work very well. You’re also not limited to just hearts and stars, obviously. You can make them whatever shape you wish.

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How to build a DIY LED ring light – a pictorial

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In this article Steve McKenzie takes us through his steps of building an LED ring light.

I used 3/4 plywood as the base for the build (I got mine in the bargain bin at the home improvement store, since any cosmetic flaws it may have had would be covered up by the duct tape.).

I used three separate LED strip lights, but I had to wire them in parallel, since when they were wired in series, the LEDs at the end were dimmer. So, I had to solder that part and reconnected it to the power cord.

I also ordered a remote control, which allowed me to dim the ring light from 100%, to 50%, and 25%.

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How To Make A DIY Square LED Ring Light

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Here’s a quick and easy DIY build you can use to spice up your collection of studio lighting. Kevin Kubota walks us through the process in the 12 minute CreativeLive session, below. He uses four of these 4′ LED strip lights he found at Lowes for $34 each, so this isn’t exactly a cheap only-need-stuff-you-already-own kind of build, but I imagine if you looked around a bit, you could source some less expensive lights. With that being said, however, Kubota prefers the more expensive LED lights of florescent lights for a few reasons. Primarily, that they are much more durable than florescent; also that they draw very little power, making them ideal to use on location with his AlienBees portable power pack. [Read More…]

The StrobePack Is A Wearable Glittering DIY Lighting Studio

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The basic goal of the StrobePack, is to provide high-quality lighting at night and in low-light conditions, although it can be used in daylight, it really works best with low ambient light. It allows low-ISO, long-exposure, higher aperture shooting, which results in sharp, clean subjects while still soaking in ambient light sources.

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DIY Macro Lighting LED Ring

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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.
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DIY Photograhy Studio Lighting – Ringlight

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This great studio ringlight tutorial is a guest post by Carl Edouard Denis from www.cedenis.com, who aside from building monster studio lights, and taking pictures, also DJs. A jack of all trades.

Let me start off by listing all the items you will need to make your light. If you are a regular DIYfer or tinkerer, you may already have many of the items on this list.[Read More…]

Hobolite is a new LED lighting brand inspired by the Golden Age of Hollywood

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If you’re a fan of retro-looking modern tech, this one will be right up your alley. It’s a new brand, Hobolite, producing lights with a very old-school Hollywood vibe. The initial range is built around three different models. There’s the Mini, Avant and Pro, each with different power outputs and capabilities. However, one thing they all have in common is wireless remote control.

The company says that all of the lights are designed to “work together as one cohesive smart system”, with optimisations for portability and ease of transport, setup and mobility on location. The lights boast a high CRI of 96 – although that’s become pretty standard these days – and are bicolour, with a white balance range from 2,700K to 6,500K.

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DIYP reviews the Vallerret Markhof Pro V3 – Winter Photography Gloves

Staying warm in cold weather is essential for maximum creativity. The warmer you are, the longer you can stay out in the cold, maximizing on compositions and conditions. It’s important that you’re able to keep your fingers nimble and warm as your hands, along with your feet and the back of your neck, are where you lose the most body heat. Vallerret have a range of photography gloves designed to solve this problem and keep you going for longer.

Since their Kickstarter launch in 2015, Vallerret have been producing photography gloves based out of their headquarters in Norway. As a cold-weather photographer and northern lights specialist, these gloves solved a lot of problems for me. I previously had the original Markhof, and they were awesome, so when Vallerret asked me to review the latest model, the Markhof Pro V3, the answer was always going to be yes.

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