Japhoto - blog

DIY Beauty dish – Part I…

with 2 comments

I always thought that the first DIY project should be an IKEA inspired one…

…and it is.

I started looking at some options for getting a beauty dish for the studio and they were either really expensive or near to impossible to get from Finland.

Well what does a poor photographer do? Go the way of the DIY of course.

So I started to keep my eyes open at stores and before long I found this lamp shade from IKEA. The best part was that I didn’t have to buy the whole lamp since the innards were sold separately.

The shade is about 60cm in diameter and about 25-30cm deep. Also an added bonus here is that the shade is already painted semi-matte white on the inside and black on the outside.

What I wasn’t too thrilled about was that “cup” on the bottom of the shade. As it turned out it was just the size I needed to expand the hole to, so no problems with it after all.

I mocked up the needed bigger opening with the cover cap from my Elinchrom strobe. That’s the thing on top of the shade in the last photo.

Here’s the new bigger hole already cut out with a Dremel and an reinforced cutting wheel. You can also admire my “armadillo” – like tape contraption which goes around the hole :)

This is from the other side and as you can see there’s a bit of burrs still on the edges here. I did tidy up the edges with a file after cutting, but I don’t have a picture of the cut after that.

That is the middle part which shows the Dremel cuts pretty well. All in all I’m really happy how the hole came out. The Dremel didn’t get out of control once during this time which is something it tends to do quite often :D

Next up will be some fabrication as I still need to do the deflector that goes in the middle and of course cooking up a mounting method for the flash unit and also the beauty dish itself.

I’m not going to mount the dish to the flash with a speedring since the dish weighs quite a lot. The flashes probably could take the weight, but I’m not willing to risk it.

Instead I’m going to do a mounting bracket for the dish, which will attach to a Manfrotto umbrella adapter. This gives me the tilt movement and also an attachment point to a studio stand.

The flash will be mounted on the mounting bracket itself so it doesn’t have to hold up any weight other than the weight of the unit itself.

Stay tuned for part II…

Janne

12.02.2011 at 2:44

Category: DIY

Tags: , , ,

2 Responses to 'DIY Beauty dish – Part I…'

Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to 'DIY Beauty dish – Part I…'.

  1. […] Do you still remember this project? If not, check part I out first. […]

  2. […] about 3 feet above and one foot to the right of the subject. 1/2 CTO gel. Fired with Cactus V4s.A few nice beauty images I found: Yet another DIY beauty dish Image by funadium Yet another DIY beau…DIY beauty dish ("if this is a beauty dish, the animal in the photo is a giraffe", is […]

Leave a Reply