How I built my ring flash, at least so far…

I’ve been wanting to play with a ring flash for some time. I have two Canon 580ex flashes already, but am not quite ready for the investment of even an Alien Bees Ringflash at this point. Also, the Alien Bees unit requires a power outlet or a portable power unit (which they will happily sell you too), but then you’re basically carrying around a car battery with you.

I had seen a number of tries to build these things on the Strobist website, but thought I might give it a try myself.

I started with a cardboard wreath box from The Container Store, some foil tape, a 4″ mailing tube, and some black/black foam core board to create the ring and give the front of the lid some structure along with the diffusion panel.

The following pictures should be pretty self explanatory as to how the whole thing goes together.

I used some packaging foam and cut it just smaller than my flash so it fits tightly without needing any fasteners. I just glued them to the back of the box.

Here’s the light distribution with the lid off. It seems that I didn’t really need all the tape on the inside of the box, but when I used it last night, it seemed to give off a brownish cast, and now that problem has gone away.

Now, I’m not really sure how I am going to mount this to my camera just yet, and it is a bit “backheavy” where the flashes go in, which is why i’m using the 3lb dumbell to keep the thing from falling over.

Also, I’m wondering if I couldn’t have built something this instead, which would’ve been MUCH more portable.

Also, and while I haven’t used it that much just yet, it doesn’t seem to give that neato shadow around the subject, and I suspect it’s because it is coming from such a large diffuse light source, rather than a small, focused ring of light.

As I take pictures with this, I will post them in my Flickr account tagged here.