The Strobist Corner: Super Simple Gel Holder For “Strobist” Gels

Here’s the thing. If you are using the “The Strobist Collection” gels from Rosco (which we reviewed here. You know that they are really great. But they are a bit undersized to be velcro-ed to a speedlight. No room on both sides of the gels to attach them to the flash.

Mike Errecart is going to show you how to fix this with a very simple hack after the jump

What You Need

• A transparency sheet, or the plastic front cover of your graduation college work report
• A bungee
• Optional : something to hold the transparency sheet while bending it. I used a metal ruler.

Instructions

1 – Cut 2 pieces of transparency sheet (10*7.5 cm, which might be… err… 4*3 inches. This size fits my Nikon SB24 and YongNuo YN460 perfectly, if you have a different flash, re-size accordingly)

2 – Bend the 2 pieces with the help of the metal ruler (or whatever object you have, or only by hand)

The ‘bending lines’ are 3cm off the edges of the piece of plastic : edge <—3cm—>bending line<— 4.5cm —>bending line<— 3cm —> edge

3 – Put the pieces of plastic on the flash head

4 – Tie them together to the flash using the bungee. I used the bungee I had my hair tied with. At this point, make sure that the strobe has some “breathing space”. Otherwise the plastic will melt.

5 – Slide the gels between the2 pieces of plastic. You can slide 1, 2 or more gels inside without any trouble (it’s not easy to use more than one gel when you use velcro).

6 – You’re done !

The bungee does the job very well, you can put the flash upside down, no problem.

The plastic pieces can be folded and tied with the bungee to be stocked in your photo bag, using almost no space

I hope this will help some of you. This is a very very simple design, but took a long time to pop in my mind. I can now have fun with my gels !