Photography Gear News

"A while back I was too cheap (lazy?) to get around to purchasing some speedlights and in typical DIY fashion for me, I figured I could replicate most results using nothing more than a flashlight. So one evening with my friend Sean and his wife, we decided to try out some long exposure light painting ideas.

To be clear, the term "light painting" is often used to describe painting light onto an image where the bulb is visible, and used to create something visual in the final result. This is NOT what I am referring to here. I've seen plenty that are nice, but I don't personally have much interest in doing this..."

"One of the ways to understand how light works in photographs is to do basic exercises. We did one way by creating the portrait lighting cheat sheet that shows how positioning a single light effect a portrait, others have done similar stuff with an egg.

Photographer Pat David had another idea. Using a CC-BY 3D scan by Infinite Realities and an open source 3D modeling software called Blender 3D (Blender is darn near real rendering engine, it can even mimic shaped bokeh), he started to play with positioning various light sourced around the scanned head."

"A little while back we shared a video about creating CFL light fixures for video lights. It involved driling and sawing. Flaviu Leordeanu sent me this cool oncept that uses almost zero toolsd to get a similar effect.

The following tutorial shows how to build a powerful “LightStrip” using CFLs. As seen in the picture below, the strip has 10 outlets in which I plugged 10 CFL bulbs.

This project started out a bit differntly. I initially thought of using 8 lights, on two 4-socketa power strips. I was going to affix the two power strips onto a wooden bar, painting it all black to make it look more “solid” and less obtrusive, and to use it as a "light-bar", just like that.

So I bought eight 2700K-1640Lumen CFLs from Wal-Mart."

"I love using continuous light sources. At first it was all about the fact that unlike strobes, I could see the light at all time and not only on shutter press. As the time went by, this became even more relevant as continuous lights can be used for video as well."