Check out Mike Gannaway‘s sweet as flash stand hack! More mounting info on the photo’s page on Flickr.
Via Strobist
Tag: flash
DIY Diana flash trigger
Check out photographer Don Brice‘s excellent modification that allows you to use normal flash/strobe units on Diana toy cameras:
I enjoy using the Diana in the studio and shooting portraits and still life lit with flash. I discovered long ago that by ripping off the usual connector on the end of the syncro cable, you could bare the two wires and jam them down the two flash sockets on the Diana-F model. Ta-da. Plug the other in to your strobes and away you go…
Continue reading instructions at Brice’s blog, Blurry Thinking.
Homemade strobe slave
Photography enthusiast Nick Pagazani was hindered by the range and fixed location of his camera’s flash. Since his camera has no connector for an external flash, he needed a light-activated slave trigger to fire a remote strobe. It had to ignore the pre-flashes used for red-eye correction and fire only on the main flash. His solution: Use a microcontroller to count pulses from a phototransistor and trigger the strobe at a switch-selectable count. Brighten up your shadowy background with this flashy accessory.
Get parts list and assembly instructions at Design News
Via MAKE Blog
DIY flash diffusing reflector
Check out Flickr member Muzzlehatch‘s instructions for making a "light bouncer/diffuser for a camera-mounted external flash to use on macro shots". Here’s the first step, be sure to view all the steps in the MuzzBounce™ Ghetto Flash modifier set.
Via Strobist
Homemade flash diffusor from take-away container
Flickr member potatomato posted a photo set on how he made a flash diffusor from a plastic take-away container.
He writes:
The Gary Fong Lightsphere is a flash diffuser that is gaining popularity with wedding and portrait photograhers world wide. His product is selling at a pace that the manufacturer can’t keep up with. This Flickr photoset demonstrates the use of a to-go container to make your own.
View photo set on Flickr
Via MAKE Blog
“Starving student” off-camera light kit
The SSO-CLK (for lack of a more poetic term) is designed to give you the most bang for your buck – with a nod toward extreme portability. It will work well with any camera that can be controlled manually and has a PC synch jack. Most SLR’s, digital or film, fit this bill. The flash is a vintage Nikon model, but it will work off-camera with anything that has a PC jack…
Continue reading at Strobist
Via MAKE Blog
Digital photography with flash and no-flash image pairs
Digital photography has made it possible to quickly and easily take a pair of images of low-light environments: one with flash to capture detail and one without flash to capture ambient illumination. We present a variety of applications that analyze and combine the strengths of such flash/no-flash image pairs. Our applications include denoising and detail transfer (to merge the ambient qualities of the no-flash image with the high-frequency flash detail), white-balancing (to change the color tone of the ambient image), continuous flash (to interactively adjust flash intensity), and red-eye removal (to repair artifacts in the flash image). We demonstrate how these applications can synthesize new images that are of higher quality than either of the originals.
See sample images at Microsoft Research
DIY flash mini-bouncer
"Here Brian shows how to build a homemade cheap flash bouncer. The flash bouncer can be used to increase the size of a hot-shoe flash. The bouncer is great and very easy to build. An alternative to the bouncer is the home made softbox. Another option for building this homemade flash bouncer is to use polypropylene sheet, it is sterdier then cardboard."
Read how-to at DIYPhotography.net
Via MAKE Blog
How to make a flash-mounted DIY softbox
"In the following article, I will demonstrate how to make your own flash mounted, home made softbox. You will need two good hands, and some patience, but your reward will be a nice softbox for the cost of only 3-4 dollars…"
Continue reading at DIYPhotography.net
Via MAKE Blog
Canon launch Flash Work site for EOS flash photography
Canon just launched a new mini-site dedicated to flash photography with the EOS/EOS Digital + Speedlite combo. It also has a Lighting Techniques section with diagrams and example photos that applies to flash in general.
Also, I strongly recommend that anyone using EOS flash—on film or digital bodies—read NK Guy’s excellent article, Flash Photography with Canon EOS Cameras, on photonotes.org, as many times as it takes to truly understand it. It’s long and complicated, but explains exactly how the whole system works, and has definitely helped me make better flash photos with the EOS system.