Photography Gear News

"A while back I was too cheap (lazy?) to get around to purchasing some speedlights and in typical DIY fashion for me, I figured I could replicate most results using nothing more than a flashlight. So one evening with my friend Sean and his wife, we decided to try out some long exposure light painting ideas.

To be clear, the term "light painting" is often used to describe painting light onto an image where the bulb is visible, and used to create something visual in the final result. This is NOT what I am referring to here. I've seen plenty that are nice, but I don't personally have much interest in doing this..."

"A little while back we shared a video about creating CFL light fixures for video lights. It involved driling and sawing. Flaviu Leordeanu sent me this cool oncept that uses almost zero toolsd to get a similar effect.

The following tutorial shows how to build a powerful “LightStrip” using CFLs. As seen in the picture below, the strip has 10 outlets in which I plugged 10 CFL bulbs.

This project started out a bit differntly. I initially thought of using 8 lights, on two 4-socketa power strips. I was going to affix the two power strips onto a wooden bar, painting it all black to make it look more “solid” and less obtrusive, and to use it as a "light-bar", just like that.

So I bought eight 2700K-1640Lumen CFLs from Wal-Mart."

"I love using continuous light sources. At first it was all about the fact that unlike strobes, I could see the light at all time and not only on shutter press. As the time went by, this became even more relevant as continuous lights can be used for video as well."

"If you went to college around the same time that I did, you may have caught the last few professors that did not use power point for slides. Instead they used an ancient device called overhead projector which took letter (or A4) sized transparencies.

They were a behemoth of a device, capable of throwing an image across a huge auditorium. And a size to match. So did the heat produced and the noise from the fan. But in the hands of the skilled professor with a few markers those projectors were an efficient tool in hammering infinitesimal math into our plugged heads.

Those devices are obsolete now. Power point presentations and DLP projectors took their place. This is why hacking one into a pattern projector feels a whole lot better than killing an SLR. This is exactly what flickr user haristobald (blog) did and worked into a super heroes series. A strobe replaced the powerful lamp to throw a superhero icon on a wall, ceiling or even a person..."

"If you've done any light painting, you must know the Orb. Usually you create an orb by rotating a string with a light at the end while doing a little spin. Round? yes! Perfect? No! What if you wanted perfect?"

"One of the ways to understand how light works in photographs is to do basic exercises. We did one way by creating the portrait lighting cheat sheet that shows how positioning a single light effect a portrait, others have done similar stuff with an egg.

Photographer Pat David had another idea. Using a CC-BY 3D scan by Infinite Realities and an open source 3D modeling software called Blender 3D (Blender is darn near real rendering engine, it can even mimic shaped bokeh), he started to play with positioning various light sourced around the scanned head."

We featured a few beauty dishes before, one made from a turkey pan, and one made from soup bowls. (Even when it seems like DIY, it is actually about food).

With a recent mention about the connection between DIYP and IKEA, I thought that it would be fun to feature a beauty dish made with the very appropriate named IKEA FOTO.

It is a simple build, the smarts here are in the bracket that takes the load of the strobe head and allows for easy mounting on a