Slave Flash on IKEA Light Stand

Using Ball Bungee, you can attach your flash to any vertical pole that you find in your house. For example, this photo is taken with a flash attached to IKEA light stand at one corner of my living room. As you can see, the use of off-camera flash can create a more interesting photo compared to on-camara or ceiling bounced flash.












This pictures shows how the ball-bungie is used to attach the flash to an IKEA light stand. You can get 4 ball-bungie at S$2 at Daiso (IMM 3rd floor)

K800i Camera Phone with Umbrella Light

With the invention of camera phone, with "real" built-in flash. This has unleashed the possibility of using the external flash creatively to create nice picture.

These are the photos taken by my K800i phone to take photo with umbrella light.

In order to create this, i make use of DIY Phone Flash Divertor and Umbrella Flash as described below.





Phone Flash Divertor
The K800i flash need to be diverted using a DIY piece of paper. I have cut a piece of white colour paper from HSBC flyer. I have also folded it so that it's thick enough to divert the flash. Lastly, I cut two slits and inserted the paper between the phone cover and the flash on the phone.

Umbrella Light

This picture shows the umbrella light. It's a flash attached to slave adaptor and mounted to an orginary tripod via a Flash and umbrella holder. Click here for more details.

Single Light Source Photo - an example

Like most boys, Ben loves cars. One day, I noted that he invented a "car park in the air". This is a photo taken using primarily single light source - light bounced off from a white umbrella.









The umbrella flash is triggered from the camera flash (via hotshoe adaptor), which point toward the ceiling. In fact there are two flashes, but I consider it single light source since the umbrella flash is much stronger than the camera flash. The camera setting is at ISO100, f11, 1/125s. This the umbrella light source front of the subject. The relative position of the subject, umbrella light and the camera can be seen from the following picture.

Simple Home Studio Lighting Equipment

Photo Taken at My Friend's Home Studio

It all started with a visit to my best friend's home studio. I took photographs of my lovely sons and wife. I love to create a studio at my home but I don't have the luxury of space and money. It could cost S$2000-S$4000 to set up a basic studio with 2 studio lights.

I started exploring the possibility of re-using my old flash units and purchase umbrella to produce photographs with studio lighting quality. After 3 months of trial and error with my sons, nieces and nephews as models. This is my collection of equipment for studio lighting. It cost merely S$111, excluding the 2 flashes. You can get similar flashes from second hand market at about $50 each.

This is the list of items, with the price and shop that I got them from.

1. Photoflex 30" convertible umbrella - S$59 from Cathay Photo
2. Flash and Umbrella Holder + Tripod - Light Stand Convertor - S$42 from Cathay Photo
   
3. Kaiser Flash Shoe Adaptor - $10 from John 3:16
4. Popular Slave Adaptor (analog) - $? (very hard to find in Singapore, please email me if you can find one)

My 2 Old Flashes:

1. Sunpak auto 36FD Thyristor - has a function to allow half, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 output. It's spoilt as it always output full power regardless of the setting.
2. Metz 32MZ-3 - flash that's working fine

Camera (not shown in picture here)

1. new Canon EOS 350D - $1300
   
2. Canon 17-40mm f4.0 L lense - $880 (second hand)

These are some photos that I have taken using the above lighting equipments. I will share more tips on the backdrop and lighting in future posting.