My Vivitar 285 flashes over 4oo times instead of only 60.
Take a six volt motorcycle battery, a block of wood and about four feet of wire, a couple of clips and Hey Presto, an external battery pack at a total cost of less than £30.
I successfully carried out similar adaptions to three of my caving flashguns back in the seventies, plus three video cameras during the nineties so I guess it follows suit that now it's the turn of my digital lighting equipment to be, shall we say personalised via a little cheap DIY.
I think the most complicated part was soldering the mid-wire joint together - these are commonly used for radio controlled car power leads as they are capable of carrying plenty of current, yet are quickly detachable in the event of smoke emerging that very first time you connect up your delicate electronics.
Be Very Careful to get the polarity correct and use a multimeter frequently during this build.
I went to Maplins for the electrical bits such as a Maplin six volt - 4.2amp battery at £9-99, charger at £11-99, twin wire, HF10L spade terminals and FE65V plastic teminal covers, a two part snap joint with part numbers GZ99 and JG05 = £30 the lot.
Incidental extras consisted of block of wood, two pan-head screws, a soldering iron, saw, screwdriver - all of which I found in my shed.
As with any alterations to any photo equipment the warranty becomes void if you go tampering within the guarantee period - that said then go for it!
First off you have to figure out which are the positive and the negative contacts inside the battery compartment. Two of them merely carry the power from one battery to another and will show a dead short when both are touched with the two multimeter probes.

Set the multimeter on Ohms for this test and a reading of zero means there's a dead short, or a figure one in the digital display means open circuit, any other reading means there is something electrical or electronic component between the probes.
If you're new to the use of a multimeter try testing a 100 watt household light bulb. First off try touching the two probes together and you'll get a reading of zero. Now touch the two blobs on the base of your bulb and you'll get a reading of approximately forty ohms as the filament is acting as a resistor between one terminal to the other, (think electric fire bar glowing red, that is one heck of a resistor, meanwhile the bulb filament glows white hot).
Let's test the terminals inside your flashgun. If it's a Vivitar 285HV like mine the two terminals closest to the front are linked and this shows up pretty clearly via bright shiny metal. The other pair of contacts are what carries the battery current into the flash unit, but which is neg and which is positive? The answer is to look at the battery assembly where each battery is clearly marked with a + sign, it's the pointy end. Of course most other flashguns have neg / pos diagrams marked in white paint inside the battery compartment.
Right, grab a piece of wood and make it the same size and shape as the interior of your battery compartment. For a Vivitar it's rounded on three corners and square on the fourth corner. There's a saw blade width groove running down one face of your block which will slide over the protruding plastic down the front facing side of the battery compartment.
Fit two screws into the end of the wooden block which will be carrying your external power supply. These go towards the rear face of the compartment with positive terminal closest to the hotshoe. Check the polarity with a multimeter before inserting it that first time!
Go to either the battery assembly, or the battery + markings to figure out which screw on your wooden block is going to be positive.
The length of wire for my setup has been kept long enough for the flash to be 8 feet up on a lighting stand and the battery on the floor, this way it can't fall any further and risk damage to my rather marvelous 285HV flashgun.
You can either leave the battery door open a little to allow entry of the wire or, for if yours is the hinged sort, file / drill a hole on the door edge. To facilitate this entry point you will have to drill a hole for the wire right down through the wooden block at an angle, from one edge nearest the door catch down to the centre being careful avoid the screws.
Recycling time for the flash on full power remains at 7 seconds for a couple hundred flashes and very gradually drops towards 15 seconds over the next two hundred. Compared to normal AA batteries this is a Godsend, a whole wedding without waiting an eternity for the damned flash to recycle!
One of these pictures shows a caving battery belt, actually an old car seatbelt on which I used for abseiling, caving and to carry a twelve volt burglar alarm battery for video cameras, (I try to save money where possible, but I must try to go get hold of one of those lightweight gardening belts for this flash battery setup).
The wide metal plate belt loop in the same shot is so I can be totally portable with my Vivitar 285HV and my DIY brolly bracket, (see a previous post for those details).
Before, with AA batteries, I was waiting thirty five seconds within twenty full power flashes and a whole minute after fifty flashes!
I do tend to use the Vivitar flashgun on 1/4 power for brolly photography and recycling time is just two seconds. Without the brolly I'd be using 1/16th power which means recycling time is virtually instant. I am far more than happy with this little bit of DIY.

Portrait lighting experiments lesson one. Broad lighting is a good place to start off with when you're new to portrait work. By broad lighting I mean the main light should be coming in from the same side of the model's face as the most prominent ear you can see from your camera position.
Here, Trevor and myself are using YeoPhotoGroup's new studio for the very first time and immediately found ourselves on a steep learning curve of real-life lighting arrangements. You have to remember that until now we've never had the room, or the time, to setup and alter the lights around quite as much as this. This first image is probably only about ten minutes into a ninety minute session and proves that lighting skills is a little like riding a bike, you never forget how it's done.
To off start with we sorted out the white balance as these lights are absolutely ancient, (30 years plus), and haven't been used for twenty years. Next we explored the possibilities of using a shutter speed which could include some of the window light, but as this revealed a ridiculously low 2 seconds we chose to ignore daylight altogether and settled on a pretty standard 1/200th of a second. The ISO is at 100 and an aperture of f14 was settled on.
YeoPhotoGroup is all about doing every thing on a shoe-string budget and these old lights have no power controls, although they do both have built in slave units. Of course there is the old fashioned 'power modifiers' of altering the flash to subject distance, either a shoot-through brolly or a bounce brolly which allowed us to retain some degree of control over flash output.
We decided that a reflector would help light the darker side of my face so a smooth white emulsioned board was held about 12 to16 inches off to camera left. Also, the fairly sharp shadows created by the full-on studio heads with built-in reflectors needed rectifying.
For the second image we added an old faded white shoot-through brolly at two feet from brolly tip to my face, which softened the shadows beautifully. (I must remember to remove that string from my glasses next time.)
An Edison screw mini flash, which has its own slave unit built in, became our hair light and was positioned about three feet behind me. In some situations it can help to use a pocket hanky as a method of light reduction - one layer equals one stop and two layers equals two stop.
A second ancient studio flash is lighting the background from tight in to one side of the textured blue sheet and low down, creating a graduated tone behind me, (keep this to the same side as the nose for best results).
The reflector was held a little higher and angled downwards to help reduce glare in my glasses, (see third picture). As the reflected light wasn't quite strong enough we angled the brolly so it aimed halfway between me and the white board.

The complete lighting setup is shown here revealing just how small a space can be used to produce perfectly acceptable portraits.
The high voltage flashes were fired by Trevors 550EX canon flash set on 1/125th power and pointing up at the grey ceiling. I did once blank my Canon by firing these monstrous studio heads direct off the camera contacts. Since then I've got hold of a radio studio head trigger for £42 from PhotoDeals UK.
All in all a brilliant evening's work with many lesson learnt. We even had time for some outdoor flash merged with daylight the results of which will be coming up in a later post.

My DIY brolly bracket was designed and made in about an hour late Sunday evening. The first outing with this monstrous gadget was Monday at the second evening of Yeovil camera club's Summer Programme. I'm encouraged by these super results, especially the lack of sharp shadows. Also as the flash is now so far above and to one side of the lens the modelling of subject's features have more character and the lighting appears so natural that it's not obvious whether there is any flash fill-in or not. All in all a great success!
All three of these photos were taken with a shutter speed of 1/200th at f7 with an ISO setting 200.
As the flash was firing through the small translucent white brolly it was turned up from its normal 1/16th power to 1/4 power.
Why I use a flashgun set so low? By using a lower power I can achieve a recycling time of just one second and it's possible to shoot off about six photos before I need to briefly pause while the flash capacitor fully recharges.
Note the soft shadows in the picture of Liz and Perta.
Ian's jumper and especially his nearest hand is not burnt out.
Cyril, our oldest member at eighty four, was the only one sitting in direct sunlight and turned out to be the most difficult to get the exposure right. I like this shot as he appears not to have been obviously fill flashed. His picture gives the impression of having the shadows lit via a large reflector.
The strange phenomenon of using this tiny translucent brolly is that the light appears equal in front, behind and off to both sides. This means there would be a fair amount hitting a low ceiling and bouncing back into the picture, great for groups. This makes my brolly bracket even more versatile than I first thought.
More experiments and results with the brolly bracket will be posted up soon. Keith Robins - strobist.

£5 flash bracket for brolly lit portrait work.
Take a flat 6mm alloy plate with 1/4 inch by 20 pitch tripod thread screw to fit any camera base and add a 15mm tank connector. Now get hold of a set of pipe benders plus about two feet of 15mm copper tubing and create a double bend. Really tighten the joint as the last thing you are likely to be carrying around is an adjustable spanner when you're out photographing,
Add a hot-shoe to lighting stand swivel adaptor on top, then a specially adapted Vivitar 285HV flashgun (See an earlier post).
The reason I adapted this gun was on account of the flash ended up way too high above the extra small shoot-thro brolly, which comes free with the swivel joint when it's bought from Hong Kong. I guess you could use a normal sized brolly but your flash bracket would need to be that little bit taller - no great shakes there.
I was pleasantly surprised at just how nicely balanced the whole contraption is. Also, for those with access to a length of chromed pipe you could make a really flash looking bracket.
The most difficult part of manufacture was drilling a large enough hole for the tank connector which is some 18mm. A very coarse round file comes in handy for this as alloy tends to clog up finer files.
You have probably noticed an odd attachment beside the tank connector, this was the connector for my mark one version which I've used many times over the last thirty years for portraits and weddings etc. Trouble was it never catered for attaching a brolly, in fact I never even thought of it until I bought this fantastic swivel head flash stand bracket for hot-shoe flashguns which comes with a spring loaded tube ready for a brolly shaft and it's even set at a slight angle so the flash fires into the centre. Plus it comes with a small translucent brolly as you can see here! What more can you ask for?
Note - the Vivitar flashgun which is mounted upside down via a stick-on lump of plastic, (go to another post to see what's involved there).
Tools required are a vice, electric drill, 10mm bit , large coarse round file, two adjustable spanners - I'm a plumber so these were readily available. Bits you'll need are about two feet of 15mm pipe, a tank connector, a strip of 6mm alloy plate, and a 1/4 inch 20 pitch thread bolt which you might be able to get from Keene Electronics who also sell the most comprehensive range of photographic filters ever. Not dealt with them for a few years but they're still going.
If you buy your swivel adaptor from Amazon, which is slightly cheaper, you won't get a free brolly with it. However, one of my older posts gives details of a white milk carton flash bounce card and yet another post shows how to make a small grid which fits neatly inside the flash window of a Vivitar 285HV.
If you've got a cheapo radio trigger you won't have dangling wires getting in the way. And if you do use a radio trigger be aware that they can be rather ungainly as there will be a lot of joints between camera and flash which can work loose and could lead to expensive repair bills, which is another reason why I glued a piece of plastic on top of my flashgun.
I get just as much fun out of making these gadgets and sharing my successes, and failures, as I do taking photos. There is a certain satisfaction in getting great results without spend great amounts. See you all soon with the next money saving post - Keith Robins.

Adding a "Copyright" logo to an image is pretty straight forward. Here's how it's done.
With your image open in Photoshop click on the Text tool and a new text layer opens above the original image. Hold down Alt and type on the numerical pad at the righthand end of your keyboard the numbers 0169 which brings up the copyright symbol ©.
Now type part of your name or logo in front and the rest after, click on the Tick in the top toolbar to accept your text and you have the basics of an original copyright logo.
Click on the FX symbol in your layers palette and choose Drop Shadow, push the top and bottom slider across to the right just a little, then tick the Bevel box.
By taking the Fill of this text layer down to zero and the Opacity down to 40 - 60% you will only see the drop shadow and a very slight distortion of the image below due to the Bevel effect. To resize, move, or rotate your new logo, hold down Control and press T to bring up the Transform box around the text. Now you can stretch the logo and distort it in all sorts of ways, plus lower or raise the Opacity to suit each image before clicking Save As and save it as a PSD.
To use this same logo on another image open both images and with the logo image highlighted click on the text layer with the Move tool and drag it over to the new image and only that layer will transfer to a new layer with your new picture. Move this new layer to the top of the layer stack, if it's not there already, and alter the size, opacity etc to suit. Again, the Transform tool can rotate, resize and reposition, plus the Opacity control is right there in the Layers palette.
Did you know that when saving as a Jpeg there is no need to flatten the image first? All the layers automatically merge into one. you complete your Save As and save it as a Jpeg. Then, once it's saved, all the layers seperate again so you can do more work on the image before saving it as another Jpeg. Very useful for building AV's where an image needs to progressively change. There's an example of this type of AV here. This AV is zipped so it won't be carrying any viruses. You'll have to download and Save As, then it can be scanned with antivirus software before unzipping it. Okay, so it takes a minute or so but the biggest benefit is that these AV's can be viewed full screen, full res, unlike its YouTube competitor. If you want a bit of fun there's another AV here.
This portrait of me was taken by my good friend Trevor Kirk. I'm holding a Vivitar 285HV at arm's length in my left hand and a 24" inch Lastolite white reflector in my right-hand about 12 inches away. The background was bright sunlight but reduced by taking the shutter speed up to 1/250th of a second- the aperture was f8 and the flash on 1/16th power - ISO 100.