Diffuser Snoot

Here's a do-it-yourself contraption you can build that combines the characteristics of a snoot and a softbox. It consists of 2 nested tubes. In my prototype I made the inner tube from a length of scrap mat board about 4 inches wide bent into a cylinder and taped in place. On both open ends I taped some white tissue paper to serve as double diffusion. This diffusion drum was then rolled into a large tube of black paper about 24 inches wide. The whole thing was about 10 inches in diameter. A flash is fired in one end and diffuse light is sent out the other.

The device has a few interesting characteristics. When up close to the subject it provides nice even diffused light. The inner diffusion drum can be slid within the outer cylinder to change how much hood is exposed beyond the diffuser. This can control how fast the light falls off around the edges. The net result is a nice soft light that falls off quickly around the edges, sort of a spot diffuser.

Snootier Snoot

A snoot, as you may know, is a tube or cone used to restrict the light from a flash or other light source to a narrower beam. I wanted a snoot that, instead of throwing a fuzzy blob of light, created more of a spotlight effect. I designed and built one for this purpose.

Usually when a snoot is used, the gentle transition from light to dark that is cast is considered desirable. When you want a crisper edge to the transition you need to address two issues:

1. The usually relatively short snoot compared to the relatively large light source surface (i.e. the flash head) means you will naturally have a fuzzy light edge thrown on the subject.
2. Unless great care is taken, the inside of a snoot is prone to reflect light off the snoot walls causing stray light to reduce constrast of the edge transition.

Using optics to focus the light beam would be an obvious choice to address these problems. If you don't want to use optics, you need another approach. I did this by designing a long snoot with carefully sized baffles inside to block all but the beam of light I wanted to throw. Total cost was a couple dollars worth of materials.

A detailed explanation of the design and construction of this snoot is available on my Web site.

So, how good a job does it do? You be the judge. The spotlight on this cheeseball lounge singer is from the Snootier Snoot.

Strobist Preliminaries

For photographers living under a rock: David Hobby over at strobist.blogspot.com has created quite a popular sensation with his advocacy and education for strobist photography, his term for the use of smarts and off-camera small-flash photography to elevate images to the next level. If you are one of the few photographers left who haven't seen it, you really need to at least browse through the wealth of information, wit, and wisdom this former Baltimore Sun photographer has to offer.

I, like many, was bitten by the bug and dusted off my old Vivitars to join the fun. Some aspiring strobists struggled a bit with the very beginning basic essentials so I put together a little slide show multimedia thing called Strobist Preliminaries to try to help. Once David mentioned it in his blog, it got 10,000 hits within 24 hours and the response from viewers has been great.

The same thing in true video format is available at Viddler and a typically YouTube-compromised low-quality version is available as well.

This was my first experiment with Soundslides software (soundslides.com) for generating Flash-based multimedia projects. It has a few small idiosyncrasies but, overall, I found it to be very easy and fun to use. Created by and for photojournalists, it's proving to be valuable for a wide variety of uses.