Camera Light Ring

Step 8

Last but not least, I put a little dab of glue around the housing and quickly joined the covers together and made sure everything was tight and lined up. I also used some electrical tape and wrapped it around the outside edge to give it a nicer look (The whole white thing looked a little cheap). I also added some black foam to the inside of the ring just to cover up the insides.

All that was left to do was try the finish product on.

I Hope this guide was helpful and for what its worth, I saved a small fortune, and now have a quality light ring for all my close up needs. As I said before, The camera is a Sony DSC-R1 and because of the way I store my lens hood on my camera, it made the perfect mount for this light ring.

NOTE: I said quality light ring(In looks anyway), but the truth is that these leds are not the perfect colour spectrum and therefore give a liitle too much blue light off. The good news is that some white balance calibration or a little bit of photoshop can fix that with ease.

Here was 2 test shots taken with my macro lens in my office. the shots were pretty lousy I admit but it just gives an example of the highlights and how I could archive the same level of brightness at a higher shutter speed. Both shots were taken at f5.6.

Shot 1 was done in natural light with a shutter setting NR 1.6
Shot 2 I was able to bump it up to 1/8 s



ENJOY!! and don't forget to vote...

Comments

[tshirtdav]

good call...still need to paint...

[bbarbaros]

wow it`s freaking bright :) is it the same camping light?

[thom__stone]

how odd we would do the same thing with almost the same camping light.

[pthorn91]

 I just want to take a minute to say THANK YOU! I will be doing this for my DSC-R1 this week :)

on a side note, how do you like yours? I love mine, besides the high noise it takes with mid level ISOs and up.
and I can never decide which viewing mode to use.
but the lack of the SLR mirror makes it incredibly quiet! perfect for nature shots and taking photos without being noticed.

GO SONY DRC-R1!

[thom_vee]

Thats funny, I came across this after I had made my own in a very similar way. Mine though can screw into the front of the lens though a 55mm reversing ring that i incorporated into it. Check out my post here- http://www.micromacroscopy.com/?p=383

[Grimbo]

Just a quick thanks to the poster for this! I've made one and it is great! (I used a 48 bulb light from eBay)

[MRedmon]

I bought one of these light rings off of ebay, cut it out to fit my Canon Digital Rebel, used a $2 battery pack with on/off switch from RadioShack, attached a keychain clip, and painted the whole thing black using PlastiDip. Thanks for giving me the idea and doing the writeup!

[alexfagundes]

No problem. Looks good! I'm glad you found the concept usefull. I entered it in the Epilog challange and would LOVE a lazer cutter so please vote! for me...hehe

[microbd]

Vous pouvez voir le mien ici :
http://picasaweb.google.com/bdproduc/EclairageAnnulaireALeds?feat=directlink

[JSUTHERLAND8]

This is nice for model pictures. Used foam tape on inside of ring to fit 2 cameras. Used some colour jells on opposite sides of the ring to get detail to stand out. (Red and Blue on 1/4 of the ring each look good.)

[JSUTHERLAND8]

IR LED's will not show colour (color) with most cameras.........just B&W.

[chalackd]

Great idea, I've got a few of these camp lights sitting around that I bought at a liquidation store for a dollar or two each. I too have a Sony cam and have scoffed at the $200 light ring, now I know exactly how to do it on the cheap. On a side note for anyone worried about the electrical aspect, LED's are 'polarized' and simply will not light if the polarity of the battery is backwards. So if you lose track of the polarity of the connections it is easy to test just by hooking up the batteries and seeing if it works. I wonder if there's some sort of material that could be used as a filter for the lights to correct the blue look without changing the camera settings around, perhaps some sort of plastic sheet that is slightly pink colored would do the trick.

[benjamin1254]

too blurry imo... but on the easier side of things you could have swapped for some IR leds and they would have done about the same.. IR light is used for night shots without that "big blue beam" look. Camras can see most fields of light and Infrared light is one of thoes things that show up on camras that we as humans can not see. Try a swap out on the next project to see if it helps any!

[frollard]

too blurry? thats just the depth of focus. Telling the camera to white-balance for the colour of the white leds would neutralize the blue light effect.

[joypad]

Can you use ir leds from old tv remotes???

[Jodex]

Yap.

[girrrrrrr2]

yeah you can. actually you probably should as they would be cheaper... and could be their own project boxes or ring in this case.

[alexfagundes]

almost all cameras have IR filters and make adding IR leds useless in this case since the filters block out the IR light. To be honest, I've seen lots of mods where people have taken out filters from their web cams and cameras ( which would be the proper way of doing it) and then adding IR leds, but I would never gut my R1. btw, voltage is not a problem in this case as the wiring stayed the same, I only changed where the batteries were kept.