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Materials:

• Ikea Tent $9
  
• Bit of wood,
  
• Ikea Shower Curtain Liner $3
  
•  Mylar/ Foil $5
  
•  Spray Adhesive $5
  

Store bought equivalent cost +$500

Last time i made a softbox out of tinfoil and card board, the result worked (and got front page of digg.com) but it was a little small for anything larger than a face so i wanted a bigger one, but these things don't scale as well as expected (think a second about a 5' cardboard box.

My kids have this tent from Ikea which is very basic since it's not meant for sleeping in, but perfect for re-purposing! I didn't have the heart to take away their tent so i splurged on a new one for less than 10 bucks. They got really excited when they saw me getting interested in their toy, so we played a bit while i built my plan of attack.

The execution was simple, i cut out the blue stuff from the bottom and sewed it over the 'door' way on the side. Then i turned it inside out and used spay adhesive to glue down the mylar foil (from ax-man surplus). Then i placed 4 bits of velcroe to the edges and placed the shower curtain liner over it to trim to size. The bracket i made is a bit flimsy but consists of some squares clamping the cross of the tent poles and a ball bunjee to hold the flash in place.

Here i am cutting up the sheets of mylar to be spay adhered to the inside of the tent, while wathing some videos. Libby is playing classic gameboy Tetris on a gameboy that has a backlight. The cats being lazy.

I used little bits of Velcro to stick the the front diffuser on. This way i can remove the cover for whatever bizare reason, i haven't thought of yet.

So i distilled the the elements of my first
DIY ring flash (cardboard and duct tape hobo version) into a more compact version that not only gets the cool catch light but also does the shadow halo effect (the large ring flash didn't do the shadow because the light source was larger than the subject, making the shadow hidden behind the subject). I also removed the diffuser material which was unnecessary in the first place and was only diminishing efficiency. This version is very similar to other models with one major distinction, this has a non-concentric construction which is responsible for a perfectly uniform light distribution without the use of diffusers or fancy prisms, just mylar, plastic, tape, and glue. Here is the construction sequence:


First I cut a strip from a sheet of acrylic,
i first cut with a scissor but found it easier to just score with a blade then snap
from behind. The thickness should be the thickness of the flash head that you'll
be using. Cut a similar strip of foil then use spay adhesive to join the two.


2. Cut to a length that when rolled
up will fit around your lens. Then use some super glue to syick it in place as seen
on the right.


3. Now place it on a sheet of foam core
and draw a circle thats the diameter of you ring plus 7.5" that way if you have
the inner ring 1.5" from one side it will be 4x that distance from the other side.
This is non-concentric placement of the inner ring is what makes this ringflash
give a uniform light distribution, that sounds good to me.


4. Cut out the panels and cover with
foil. Then cut a hole for the ring an a larger hole in the other panel that .5"
larger. 5. Cut out another strip as in the first step but make this one long enough
to wrap around the outside. Then tape it all together.


Here you see the classic halo shadow.
NEXT UP: Make a giant softbox from an Ikea tent.

I saw an article¹ that compared the way several experienced artists eyes tracked an image vs the eyes of self proclaimed 'non-artists'. The difference was striking, the difference was compounded when the groups were asked to draw the images that they had looked at.



The non artists eyes focussed on the center and the details, eyes, lips, nose, sun, moon and when asked to draw a duplicate there rendering had disproportional details like large eyes, lips sun, moon and were poorly aligned.

The artists eyes uniformly tracked the image with a random tracking pattern, seeing the 'big picture'.

So for me I'm always trying to re-learn to look at something not for the details but for the larger shapes and proportions and when looking through a viewfinder I "frame for the edges", I practice by looking quickly at an image then close my eyes and try to rebuild that image in my head.(Ken Rockwell?) With photography it's easy to just try and just compose to get everything in the shot, but removing items is what makes the shot interesting, keep you guessing. In your head re-framing objects becomes effortless and you have to think about whole objects not just the details. Oh and skip rule of thirds!

1. Eye tracking article scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/03/artists_look_diff...

Also Check out this Flickr discussion on the topic, some Great tips!

"Choose a single subject and shoot it every day. Flowers, building, your kid... it doesn't matter, but you gotta come up with 60 different shots of the same thing."
"Get Learning to See Creatively: Design, Color & Composition in Photography

Get the flash off the camera, even a ring flash!!!

The Ring Flash / Ring Light is a unique light source since it gives you a hard light but because the light comes from all around the lens the only shadow is a darkened halo around a subject, but the subject it self is uniformly lit.

My favorite effect of a ring light is the ring in the eyes and the topographical effect of the highlights it creates on the face, normally a head on light source would flatten a face but the ring flash makes highlights on relief areas of the subject. I fell in love with the effect in this image by Janosch Simon (this images is SFW but his full portfolio may not be if you live in the US)

Creating a ring flash can either be done with expensive flash units that are actually capable of a circular arc in a circular flash tube/bulb, or by modifying the straight round beam of a hot shoe flash unit.

There seems to be two ways to go about it, diffuse the source then mask it, or use precise reflections to redirect the beam. The second would result in higher efficiency and a higher "focal length" of the flash since there would be more direct light.

In order to control the size of the ring on the face you have to change the distance of the ring or the size of the ring. Having it off camera would allow you to take telephoto shots and still have large ring in the eyes ( a telephoto shot with a tradition on camera ring flash would be far away enough to reduce the reflection of the flash in the eyes to a bright dot)

What i did was adapt this great design by The Feral Photographer and made the following changes.

1:made the circles NOT concentric, the light escaping from the diffuser causes the light level to get dimmer at the end opposite the flash, similar to , here it comes, the inverse square law. So i sized and located the inner circle to so that the distance at the far end was four times less than the flash end this would result in a uniform distribution of the light.



2: Made it larger, this means that i could use longer zoom.




Materials:
2 sheets of cardboard
mylar/tin foil
Tape, Knife
Diffuser material is a Target plastic bag

Final Effect:

click image for super hi-res image (copyright yo)

So Alexander Johnson took my image and had is skilled way with it creating this image:Post Processing by Alexander Johnson - Thanks!




learn to light on strobist

the Take TV is a flash drive that decodes a xVid, Divx, mpeg4 and outputs to a s-video under $100! And it's controllable by remote.

It's made by the folks who made my Sansa Express which has proven to be my favorite mp3 ever becasue its nononsense bright OLED Screen, cableless useage, ans seamless Rhapsody support. If the Take TV works this well i will be very pleased.

Right now every time i have a video that i want to watch on TV i have to haul my computer next to the TV to connect the video and audio. The take TV come in 4/8gb flash stick shape and has a remote and TV dock, this totally rocks because it doesn't require a full blown HTPC but delivers 99% of what i would use a HTPC for. 4gb is about 5hours which is about double my usual tv episode serving.

I could see this working great with those 'second car monitors' made to extend a portable dvd players screen. You would be able to load a few movies on the device and not have to burn them to DVD. If i'm not mistaken an iPod that has video would be able to do most of this except remote control, and of course would require a proprietary cable and iTunes to download from the PC. A nano video is only $149 and has a screen, but doesn't support xVid and Divx or have a remote, so if all you do is use it play stuff on your TV (oh hate iTunes) then get the take TV, other wise get a player that also has a screen.

http://take.tv