Making a Cheap Flash Diffuser

Direct Flash can be harsh and make for ugly shadows. There are products on the market to get around this problem, Fong’s Lightsphere (about $60) and Demb’s diffuser ($35) for example. But being cheap I decided to make one that is good enough, for $1.13, and a little work. I’d say it took me about 10 minutes, total, to make my version.

I was at the local supermarket and saw these at 3 for $3.39. There had been a thread running on one of the email lists that I read, about diffusers and these seem to fit the bill for making one.

rubbermaid twist and seal box

RUBBERMAID 16 oz TWIST&SEAL BOWLS 3@$3.39

They have nice external ribs that I thought might add a bit more diffusion but are also almost transparent. When I got the home I assembled the tools I needed. Just a magic marker, an art or utility knife, and a small piece of sand paper.

parts

BOWL, KNIFE, LID and SAND PAPER

Hold your flash down on the top of the bowl and trace around the head with the magic marker. Then carefully go around the marked area with the sharp blade. Cut to the inside of the mark otherwise the hole can be too large depending on the thickness of your marker. Do not try to cut thru in one slice but make shallow cuts until you work your way thru the plastic. The material seems to be just a bit brittle and cutting thru in one cut might cause cracks in the plastic. Check the hole for fit on the flash head. It fits snugly on mine but I had to do a little trimming. If you make a mistake you have two more lids to work with.

Next I took the sand paper and just roughed up the inside of the bowl to make a frosted surface. It probably doesn’t matter but I tried sanding in different directions to make a more random pattern of scratches. I think this will increase the diffusion effect over the almost transparent plastic. Then I just slid the lid on the flash and screwed on the bowl.

Final assemby

DIFFUSER ON MY OLD SB-26 FLASH

You can see the frosted effect on the final version. All these shots where taken with the flash and diffuser except for the last one which was with the camera pop-up flash.

You may notice the velcro around the flash head on my old Nikon SB-26 flash. That has a purpose which I’ll talk about in an upcoming post.

Old North Bridge

——-Update———

I had to re-insert all these posts up to the end of February 2009 after updating to Wordpress 2.7.1. Hopefully that will not happen again.

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Well I have worked my way thru the forest of wordpress setup and Godaddy to finally get this blog up and running. I’ll have a few comments about doing  your own blog in a following post.

My vision of how this blog will work is this. I am active on a number of email lists and find myself making the same comments over and over again as new people look for the same info. I thought a blog would be a good place to post FAQ type answers and then I could just post an answer here and point people at the answers. Or at least my version of the answers.

I’m also going to post general ruminations about the art and techniques of photography. Tricks and work arounds. I’ll be adding pointers to good resources that I have found on the web and elsewhere. And especially to other blogs and lists.

Right now I’m using Canon DSLR gear (I have a 350D and a 40D) and so you should expect that most of my comments will be targeted towards that equipment. This isn’t to discourage comments about other brands, I just happen to like Canon gear and of course I have a lot of money in Canon gear. I do not want to get into any bickering about ‘my brand is better than your brand’ by either myself or in the comments. You should certainly feel free to make brand specific comments but keep them to a polite level.

I also am a big proponent of post processing. While I think we are better off doing what we can to get a good exposure in the camera, I think that it is the rare shot that cannot be made better in post production(PP). All digital shots need some sharpening and other minor tweaks in PP.  I use Adobe Photoshop, CS3 right now but I will almost certainly move up to CS4 as soon as I scrape up the cash.

I’m also interested in photographic history and think we can all learn something by looking back. So expect some posts about that.

My comment policy will be this: I love comments and will try to answer all of them. Just keep to the normal blog and list behavior. No personal attacks and no profanity or inappropriate language. No politics at all will be welcomed.

So hopefully I will get some views and off we go.