Sunday 24 May 2009

A flash bounce card for nothing!! A full on flash gives harsh shadows which to say the least appears unflattering in any portrait. This is where a flash bounce card can come in handy and if you can make up one for nothing then there's something left over for a graduated filter, or better still, a second flash, or maybe a faster memory card.
Most milk cartons are translucent plastic and you'll loss a fair bit of reflected light, but a Cravendale milk carton is virtually a solid, photographic, white and won't upset your daylight colour balance. Okay, so you're probably still on auto white balance, we'll discover how to control that in an upcoming post.
The part of a recycled 4 litre milk carton opposite the handle makes a superb reflector, is easy to fold, retains is shape and tucks neatly into a camera bag while still attached to the flash head with a rubber band. In use it wraps the flash around a plant giving an amazing backlighting effect. A typical exposure would be around f11 at 1/16th flash power, plus 1/200th of a second to make the background really dark, or as low as 1/30th yet still not need a tripod. In the photo you can see the stability benefits of those slivers of wood glued to my Vivitar 258hv. Just discovered this link where these fantastic gun are still available and although the quality did drop for a while they are now much more reliable. Another gun worth looking at is the LP120 from the same suppliers.
Did you know that 'For Sale' signs are made of Corex board? These are extremely useful to us strobists as flash lighting modifier grids. When you want only a small part of the scene to be lit by your hotshoe flashgun you could use a snoot. An early DIY snoot for me consisted of a piece of white mountboard folded into a retangular tube which restricted the output to a small pool of light. The trouble was this twelve inch monster took up a lot of room in my camera bag.
A month later I discovered an alternative, a grid! Creating my first grid took an hour of cutting out strips of Corex board about three inches by half an inch and sticking them together with double sided tap, then trimming the whole thing until it slots into the reccess of my Vivitar flash window.
What happens now is the light has to travel down lots of tiny square tunnels, okay, so these tunnels are only half an inch long, but they do tend to do a very similar job to a twelve inch snoot without the space consuming size.
I didn't really go around cutting bits off the edge of 'For Sale' signs, mine came from a local recycle center for the princely sum of 10 pence, which was for enough to make fifty grids!
Flash photography needn't be expensive. This little second gun setup cost just £30 plus a bit of imagination. The old flashgun was registering 84 volts, far too high for my digital camera which should only be handling 6 volts and under.
Radio triggers are also vulnerable, although the voltage limits are slightly higher, hence I'm still use a tiny slave unit from the 1970's costing £5 new on my second gun. A modern slave is not much more expensive now, according to this website, so I'll be treating myself someday soon.
The short sync lead at just 30 pence consists of a mini-jack plug soldered to an oldfashioned pc sync connector and even this DIY adaption harks back to the 1980's.
The plastic mechanism of three of my old Photax lighting stands are now held together courtesy of pieces cut from a wire coathanger holding the legs in place, these robust old stands cost all of £19 each 25 years ago but were worth it, although without the wire repairs they would probably have been scrapped a fair while ago.
£1 for a DIY plastic flash bracket complete with swivel and a brolly shaft hole was a bargain and has served me well since 1976. However, the modern equivalent, a Lastilite Tilthead Adaptor costs £16 plus postage from Warehouse Express and is far superior.