I had a day where I had some spare time, and my fingers are still sticky with glue.
With the impending 16 hours of darkness per day during the Michigan winter, I figured now was a good time to try to make a ring flash. The idea is simple - get a ring of light around the lens of your camera. Real ring flashes cost lots of money - hundreds of dollars. They also work really well. But for about $25, what do you get? Inspired and guided by Jędrek Kostecki's instructions, I started out with some ingredients - a bunch of bowls ($20 from Bed, Bath, and Beyond - I assume this is the Beyond part), a 3" pipe coupling, aluminum foil, duct tape (to make it an official project), three different kinds of glue (I never used the Elmer's Glue-All), and a lens. The 3" pipe was $3 or so, the glue, duct tape and foil were around the house. So far, I think we're OK.
I choose some bowls from the set based on where the pipe would fit and how big a gap I could get between the two bowls, thinking I'd want a bigger gap. The biggest bowl and the third smallest seemed to work OK. That is them to the right with the little bowl balanced on the pipe. It already looks like a ring flash. Seriously, squint. A lot. OK, close your eyes and imagine a ring flash. See?
The bowls I found were melamine. If you can avoid it, don't use melamine bowls, they are very hard and pretty brittle. You can't just "cut" them, you get to use power tools!
I traced the pipe on both bowls and traced the flash head on the outer bowl. I thought for the briefest of moments that a utility knife would do the job. That's ridiculous. I ended up using a power drill to make starter holes for the sabre saw.
I started with the little bowl, figuring if it exploded or caught fire, I could try the next one. Which almost certainly wouldn't do any of those things, being the exact same material and all.
You can see where the bowl sort of shattered. I didn't drill a pilot hole for this one, I just started sawing. I don't know that it would have mattered, but if you're squinting at the little pictures looking for the pilot hole, you can stop. As you can see on the right, the pipe pretty much fits on the bowl. Yay.Jędrek's instructions suggest gluing the pipe to the bowl, but I couldn't figure out what sort of glue would work with such a small contact area. He also suggests putting the foil on first, but then you're just gluing the foil to the bowl or other foil. So I just duct-taped the pipe to the bowl, using a lot of duct tape. It seems steady enough. Then I ran a bead of Liquid Nails around the inside edge. That just seemed to make everything sticky, and I touched it every time I picked that part up. I'm hoping it dries or sets or turns into something less sticky. A long lens through there might get glued to that. It's worth keeping your lenses in mind when you start applying glue to everything.
Encouraged by my success with modifying the small bowl, I set to work on the big bowl.
Looking carefully you'll see where the part I cut out shattered. Again, avoid the melamine. However, I do want full credit for my most excellent circle. Thank you.
Cutting out pieces from the relatively flat bottom wasn't so bad. Cutting the hole for the flash head was a little more dangerous. My advice is to get an assistant that you don't really care about to hold the bowl while you drill and saw. I didn't have one of those, so I held it myself and it was OK, but a little scary. As you can see, though, there's a decent hole for the flash head and the flash even fits. Yay.At this point, all of the drilling and cutting is done. That was a relief. On to more taping and gluing - much more my speed.
You can see how I attached the pipe to the bowl - lots of duct tape. And with the foil and the spray glue, you can see my intentions. (by the way, who ever invented spray glue should get a medal. Glue you can spray. Brilliant!) And, after discovering lots of things about spray glue that I'm sure all you craft-y types already know (spray both sides, don't spray it into the wind, watch out for your hands, etc.) I managed to get lots of shiny foil stuck to all the appropriate places. Now we're cooking with gas. That things looks a lot like a ring flash. A homemade one. By an amateur. OK, squint. Not that much, smarty-pants. I'm getting there.After duct taping the inside of the pipe to the outside of the big bowl (again Jędrek recommends glue, but I couldn't find any two things to glue together), and affixing (more duct tape) some Velcro™ to the area around the hole for the flash head, I had what appeared to me to be a ring flash.
Yay, circular light. That was at 1/128th power from the 580EX II jammed in there.
Now, for a model. How was it I had all this spare time? Oh, right, my wife and daughter aren't here. That left only one model. Here kitty, kitty... man, talk about uncooperative. So the photo isn't great, and there are other catch lights in his eyes, but you can see it - the circle of light in his eyes! Also, the light around him isn't bad. That was at f/2.5 and 1/64th power on the flash. So there's some hope there for getting some light out. As soon as I find a more cooperative model, I'll post more photos.
