Mixing Bowl Ringlight

Ahh the music of chefs everywhere cursing my name into the 5th ring of Hades for desecrating the all mighty mixing bowl. Masterfully crafted from the finest stainless steel, by a sweat shop in northern China... The mixing bowl is the only implement a chef uses to mix his ingredients into the finest production he could design. True, he could just thrown his ingredients on the floor and perform the Mexican hat dance to get his cookie dough all mixed up...but really do you want shoes prints in your Keeblers??

Like the mixing bowl, light is the photographer's tool for manipulating, creating and mastering his/her subject. To manipulate light photographers for years have designed ingenious devices to blast their subjects with light. Short of giving their subjects an impromtu tanning session, most light devices are strobes, hot lamps, the sun, ambient light, or even the light emitted by chemical reactions in bugs butts!

The ringlight is one device to irradiate your subject with a circular ring of luminous luxury. The shadow created by the ringlight tends to halo the outer body, while the center of the subject is exposed radially from the center of the X and Y axis of the ringlight. In other words, it looks groovy!

Here's a few pics of my "salad bowl" as my friend Traci calls it. Click on them for the mega high resolution!

This is the dangerous end, that's why you're on the other side! Photons are emitted at the speed of light toward models eyes, wear eye protection! The white stuff covering it all is wedding dress material I bought down at Michaels. It has a nice even, smooth texture. I used a high temperature glue gun...careful, my flesh is still attached to that bowl somewhere along the edges! The internal tube is 4inch to 6 inch A/C coupler, sitting on some weird alien looking pie pan with a 3.5 inch hole in it. I think it's called a flashing mount or something. I used JB Qwik to weld all this together, and man, is that stuff strong!


And the back. This is the part you(as the photog) get to see most often, unless you have U shaped arms. You shove your camera, carefully through the wazoo of this thing. Notice the foam padding I added, it has sticky stuff on it, but I used super glue to lock it down for good. There are two rings of padding, the one at the very beginning opening and one about an inch inside, on the sharp edge of the coupling.


And the side shows how my Vivitar 285HV flash is mounted. I hacked a whole with my Dremel tool and used velcro to secure the flash. The bracket holding the flash is a small L bracket bent with my mighty tools and bolted into place. The flash is mounted on a flash mount to 1/4 nut adapter (ebay $5). The adapter has 3 plugs for sync cords. The snazzy handle on the right is a $2 item from Home Depot.

Total price... hmm lets see, $2 handle, $6 bowl, $2 bracket, $6 dress material, $8 internal tubes, $6 glue, $2 padding, $10 misc hardware....not counting emergency surgery, transfusions etc...that comes to a whopping $42! Nice! The Vivitar you can get for $85, plus the $5 adapters, man I'm still under $200 and I have 9 and a half fingers left, what a bargain!

I can't wait for my next couple of model shoots. One would have been today, but she had an emergency :( Luckily, she rescheduled for next week. So keep on the look out for some cool stuff. I have two more models lined up for some shots aswell, but no firm dates yet.

Zulu, get over here, I've got some ringlight practice! :)

hasta la pasta
-Mark

p.s. the perfect white back ground is courtesy of another contraption I built. A queen sized softbox made out of wooden rods with queen, fitted sheets on it! It's so rickety and about to fall apart, but man is it awesome!