Big Dingus

OK so here’s the home-made ring flash. Ingredients:

• One small Amazon book box
• 2 Quantaray slave strobes
• 2 plastic strap ties
• 1 rubber band
• 1 piece of random white-ish cotton cloth
• Aluminum foil
• Duct tape

(Credit to Pat for most of the assembly photos.)

Holes are cut in the back of the box, one in the middle for the lens and then two on each side for the strobes:

The strobes fit on the back such that the flashy part kind-of pokes into the holes. Plastic strap things hold them in place:

On the front is some cloth. It’s got a frilly pattern woven into it, but I don’t think that’s important:

The lens pokes through the back, and the box fits more-or-less snugly over the filter:

The lens hood is screwed on (yes, screwed) and a rubber band holds the cloth flaps:

Here you can see the catchlight from the contraption:

That’s all there is to it. I can shoot at 1/160, f10 to f16, depending on how close I am. That gives more depth of field than I’ve gotten with daylight. Gallery from this afternoon, immediately following the (re-)assembly of the ring flash:

(That’s a “Batfaced Cuphea” flower; I didn’t notice the aphids until I saw it on the screen.)

For Melissa, tourmaline with amethyst:

Wulfenite:

Dioptase (I think; might be diopside but the crystals seem too big):

Galena (perhaps with sphalerite but I don’t know):

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Macro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.