The Portland Strobist Gathering Meets The DIY Christmas Tree Light Ringlight

This past Sunday (January 27th.) was an opportunity for Strobist fans in the Portland, Oregon area to get together once again when Smashbox Photography and Me Take Photo hosted and organized the second "official" PDX Strobist gathering here in the Northwest. Around twenty five people showed up for the meet-up (a really fun group of folks, btw), and our time was spent shooting tons of pictures, playing around with various lighting tools and equipment, drinking lots of coffee, drinking a variety of more adult-oriented beverages, being social, and running through a series of small four and five person camera/lighting workshops. It was a great event -- a chance to meet some of the other strobe and lighting enthusiasts in the Portland area -- and a way for people to trade real-world knowledge about pictures and picture-taking in a way that helps make all the participants better photographers, better gaffers (a/k/a: "lighting techs"), and more aware of what other camera folks in town are doing...

For myself, the two most outstanding features of the meet-up were: 1) it gave me the chance to work with real, live, breathing models -- something that I've never really done before. 2) It was an opportunity to pull out my brand spanking new homebuilt DIY Christmas Tree Light Ringlight and see how well it would work with real, live, breathing models.

Whoa! It worked great!



The picture that you see above (of the very lovely and talented Aimee) is one of the first photos that I snapped at this Sunday's event and -- dang' -- I'm mighty, mighty happy with it. The quality of the light on Aimee's face is just amazing... I absolutely love the ringlight sparkle reflected in her eyes and the way in which all illumination just drops off sharply at the edge of her face and hair. Nice! I'm also kinda' fascinated by the texture that the light adds to Aimee's hair -- an almost 3D effect.

Here's a behind the scenes image of Aimee and the ringlight in action:



The ringlight itself is made up of 300 individual Christmas Tree Lights which have been hot glue gunned onto a quasi-circular masonite board. The real selling point of this DIY project -- and what makes it truly unique from other DIY sorts of ringlights -- is that the hundreds of individual Christmas lights create a bright sparkle in people's eyes, glasses, goggles, or any other sort of shiny surface that the light is pointed at, and these hundreds of sparkles end up looking almost like stars or fireworks when reflected back. Here's a perfect example using "Ameana Acid," a roller derby gal with Portland's Rose City Rollers:



Pretty dang' cool...

Saving the best for last, I really, really, really like the photo shown below -- a "Strobist Throat Exam" of sorts -- and I have to say that I'm simply stunned by the quality of the light that can be created with a simple piece of masonite and some glued on Christmas Tree Lights. I'm also kinda' stunned by "Ameana's" healthy tonsils and uvula.



Had I known what could sort of lighting could be achieved with such a basic set-up, well, I probably would have built at least two or three of these crazy lil' ringlight devices.

Matt

P.S.: Just to clarify my overall lighting technique a bit, in all of the above photos I'm using a single "ringlight" to key my subjects (i.e.: Aimee and "Ameana"), and then placing a single Vivitar 285 at 1/16th power (and heavily gelled) behind the women and pointed up to give a bit of illumination on the backdrop behind them.