Back in May, we featured a clever hack by photographer Paul Adshead that involved using an IKEA storage box as a $6 laptop sun shade for outdoor shoots. Now he's back again with another nifty photo trick: using a smartphone and a car phone mount for photographic lighting.
Aputure's latest Light Storm LS 1c is a powerful accessory for any photographer looking to light up their workspace. Today, we're taking a look at how well the system handles, along with some of the unique features it has to offer including built-in wireless control and DMX light controller compatibility.
Over the past half year, Latvian photographer Gvido Mūrnieks has been testing out a DIY ring light he made for himself. The light is large enough to shoot with longer focal length, but at the same time it's small and light enough to quickly throw into the trunk of your car on the way to a shoot.
There are already a good number of portable lighting studios on the market, but WhiteBison’s SOOC Studio strives to be the best full-featured option. The kit includes a foldable carrying case that transforms into a durable 18x16x12-inch setup with built-in 6,000K LED strips and an easy-to-clean plastic infinity curve.
Want a portable and powerful LED light for illuminating your shots? The "Sun-Blaster" is a 1000 watt equivalent LED flashlight that you can build yourself for around $40.
Taking photos is one of the main ways people use smartphones these days, and phone makers are trying all kinds of ideas for one-upping its competitors in photo features. ASUS just showed off its latest idea today: a powerful xenon flash dongle that attaches to the back of the phone.
For a new marketing campaign titled "Inspired Light," Infiniti invited Canadian professional light painting photographer Patrick Rochon to Dubai to transform three of its cars into "moving light painting brushes."
High speed photography is all about fast-flash; the faster your flash, the faster the instant you can adequately freeze on a digital sensor. Modern strobes are pretty good at this, with flash durations as fast as 1/20,000 of a second, but a Bristol-based company Vela Labs is about to take high-speed photography to unheard-of heights.
Introducing the Vela One, ‘the world’s first high speed LED flash' that boasts a flash speed starting at 1/2,000,000 second, or 500 nanoseconds.
Portable, bright, waterproof and rugged, the [qudos] Action light is an interesting addition to the lighting world that wants to open up a new world of nighttime action cam footage.
The film 'Afterglow' by Sweetgrass Productions doesn't even officially release until October 19th, and yet it's already being hailed as "one of the most cinematically profound ski movies ever made." The three-minute teaser above gives you an idea of why.
Got $30, a frisbee and some free time this week? Need a ring light? If you answered yes to both of those questions, we've got a neat, quick and super simple DIY tutorial that's perfect for you.
If you’ve been looking to get your hands on an LED ring light but don’t have the cash to burn, this weekend project is just for you. It’s called the Octo-Light, and it’s a DIY LED ring light create by Instructables user comsa42.
We’ve featured the incredible visual effects work of Joey Shanks of Shanks FX before when he created homemade holograms . And today we’re back with yet another piece that celebrates the 30th anniversary of the 1984 film Ghostbusters: remaking the iconic proton streams using a clever light-painting technique.
Whether you're using one to shoot video or stills, LED light panels are a wonderful tool to have in your arsenal. But while they are available from a variety of companies, in a number of sizes and shapes, almost all quality LED light panels come with one, discouraging attachment: the price tag.
Thankfully, the above tutorial from DIY Perks breaks down how you can build your own $500 LED light panel for just under $70.
If you're sick of retro, love cameras, and used to dream of installing 'underglow' on your souped up Honda Civic, then Pentax has a DSLR you will absolutely adore.
Jokes aside, the new Pentax K-S1 from Ricoh combines portability and powerful imaging capabilities with a status quo-shattering flashy design and simple UI that will undoubtedly appeal to a lot of first-time DSLR buyers.
Yesterday evening, Pye Jirsa over on SLR Lounge shared an interesting and informative video about how he’s managed to incorporate a small army of LED camping lights into his photography workflow to great effect.
With LED lighting systems growing in popularity for both video and photo use, it’s inevitable some interesting variations of such setups are going to come out. Case in point: behold the RagLite, or as its creators prefer to call it, “the first-ever flexible LED light bank.”
Using two Black Armored Hexacopters, a RED Epic and an LED lighting rig, aerial video specialist Simon Sjörén and his team took to the mountains of Åre, Sweden to create a unique nighttime ski video.
If you're just getting into studio photography, trying to figure out how to light, shoot and set up your shots can be both frustrating and expensive. After all, if you're trying to take high-quality studio shots, you need high end strobes and all sorts of other gear, right?
Maybe not. Of course high end equipment helps, but in the video above, photographer Alex Koloskov of Photigy shows you how you can light studio still life shots using a few $30 dimmable LED bulbs instead of strobes.
LED streetlights are the wave of the future, but in addition to being the environmentally friendly choice, doing away with high-pressure sodium streetlight has one other significant (at least to photographers and filmmakers) side effect: it completely changes the look of night photography.
Are you sick and tired of switching between a video LED light and flash? Folks, it just may be that LightRight is the product for you.
Designed by ColorRight (a family owned business that specializes in lighting for photographers and videographers), LightRight is the LED panel and flash diffuser combo you've potentially waited for you're entire life. It's not out yet, but there's an Indiegogo campaign going on right now to get this thing on sale near you.
Lumio is an innovative new LED light idea that has been making quite a splash over on Kickstarter. Conceived by San Francisco-based industrial designer Max Gunawan, the lamp has raised nearly half a million dollars from nearly 5,000 backers over on Kickstarter -- after an initial goal of just $60,000. It's a lamp that's inspired by the design of a book: open the cover and the light turns on, close it and it shuts off.
The "flash units" found on the backs of smartphones may be getting more powerful, but the general idea has largely remained the same: use a powerful LED light that can illuminate a scene when you need a little extra light. The power output doesn't really stack up to the flashes found on compact cameras, but Google has one solution for making the flash a bit brighter.
In a recently published patent, the company outlines the idea of placing multiple LED flashes on smartphones, perhaps in a ring around the camera unit.
Photographer Caleb Charland is well known for his projects that mix science and photography. Recently he has been working on photos showing "alternative batteries," or using things like fruits and coins to power lights. His latest image in that series is the above photo that captures the energy contained in a single orange.
Projecteo is what you would get if you crossed a View-Master with a carousel slide projector and then miniaturized the love child using a shrink ray. It's a tiny LED-illuminated, battery-powered projector that takes in wheels created from 35mm slide film. Each wheel holds 9 photographs, and focusing the resulting image is done by twisting the lens barrel on the tiny gadget.
What if there existed a lightbulb that you could completely control using your phone? And by "completely control", I don't mean simply switching on and off. I mean being able to precisely control the brightness of the light emitted, and even the exact color of the light.
Want to light your nighttime photographs with something that can be mistaken for a portable sun? Check out this monstrous homemade flashlight composed of 513 separate LED lights. Created back in 2008 by Ledcreations, the device offers a whopping 3500-4000 lumens of light -- way more than the hundreds of lumens offered by other powerful flashlights on the market.
Okay -- maybe it's trying to reinvent the wheel, er, ring flash, but this could be an interesting gadget: Chinese company CononMark has unveiled a flash system that looks like a cross between a ring flash, speedlights, bracket flash and modeling lights.
Have some slide film sitting around and no slide projector to show them off with? Diapod is a tiny product designed for you. It's a simple and lightweight slide projector that uses a tabletop tripod, aluminum body, and LED light to project your slide film photos.
For a recent advertising campaign to bring attention to its hydrogen-powered cars, Mercedes-Benz decided to make a car “invisible” …
Fashion photographer and filmmaker Jacob Sutton recently had the idea of capturing "a lone character made of light surfing through darkness". He had designer John Spatcher create an LED enveloped suit, and then had pro snowboarder William Hughes wear it while zipping down the slopes of the Rhône-Alpes region in south-east France.
At the Photo Plus Expo happening in NYC right now, Polaroid is showing …
At the Bring to Light nighttime art festival in NYC last weekend, artists Sean McIntyre and Reid Bingham showed off the Rainbow Tracer -- a programmable rotating bar of LEDs that paints giant rainbows into the backgrounds of group portraits.
Gavin of Sydney, Australia created an awesome 2-meter long programmable staff that makes painting giant words and images as easy as waving/walking the staff around during a long-exposure photograph. The staff, which he call the LightScythe (we would have called it the "Lightsaber"), was inspired by the Wi-Fi light painting project we shared here earlier this year.
The hardware is pretty simple. There’s a 2m programmable LED strip inside an acrylic tube, which is controlled from a small receiver and battery pack. A laptop PC with a wireless Xbee link sends the image data to the scythe at a specified time. [#]
Here’s one of the most creative examples of light painting and long-exposure photography we’ve seen — a few techie …
I had some stuff lying around as well as saw some parts as I was out and thought this would be fun to make. I have around $20 invested in parts. On eBay I saw ring lights for anywhere around $40 on up, so this will save you money and it was fun to make.
If cameras can have external flashes, why can't mobile phones? The iFlash is a flash module that allows owners of older iPhones to illuminate dark scenes with a blast of LED light. iPhone 4 owners can also use it to gain some additional light.