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Ping-pong ball diffuser
Yesterday we attended a little movie-watching party at my friend's place.
I decided to take a few shots. Since I still don't have a decent shoe-mounted flash (saving up for 580EX), and bringing one of my potato-masher 555's was too much of a hassle, I decided to finally try the ping-pong ball diffuser. One of my ping-pong playing friends provided me with a white ball. It took me a couple of minutes to cut out the segment I needed with the kitchen knife/scissors.
Here are a few shots from the party. Nothing spectacular, just a bunch of snapshots, but IMHO way better than a bare flash.
#1. Helen
#2. Kirill
#3. Beth
The rest of the pictures are here: http://nik.smugmug.com/gallery/959567
Canon 20D, EF 28-70L f/2.8. All shot in RAW, at ISO 400, mostly 1/60th x f/4.
Basic ACR sharpening and noise removal, auto levels, some cropping, but no major PP otherwise.
Bottom line: cut-out ping-pong ball (with attached stripe of a scotch tape) now lives in my backpack :thumb
Gotchas: mostly useful for the indoors with the conventional ceiling. Outdoors or in big halls/gyms may simply result to a weaker flash, same as stopping flash power level down without bringing in any bonuses (unless shooting from a very close distance, I'd say 4 ft max)
HTH
I decided to take a few shots. Since I still don't have a decent shoe-mounted flash (saving up for 580EX), and bringing one of my potato-masher 555's was too much of a hassle, I decided to finally try the ping-pong ball diffuser. One of my ping-pong playing friends provided me with a white ball. It took me a couple of minutes to cut out the segment I needed with the kitchen knife/scissors.
Here are a few shots from the party. Nothing spectacular, just a bunch of snapshots, but IMHO way better than a bare flash.
#1. Helen
#2. Kirill
#3. Beth
The rest of the pictures are here: http://nik.smugmug.com/gallery/959567
Canon 20D, EF 28-70L f/2.8. All shot in RAW, at ISO 400, mostly 1/60th x f/4.
Basic ACR sharpening and noise removal, auto levels, some cropping, but no major PP otherwise.
Bottom line: cut-out ping-pong ball (with attached stripe of a scotch tape) now lives in my backpack :thumb
Gotchas: mostly useful for the indoors with the conventional ceiling. Outdoors or in big halls/gyms may simply result to a weaker flash, same as stopping flash power level down without bringing in any bonuses (unless shooting from a very close distance, I'd say 4 ft max)
HTH
"May the f/stop be with you!"
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Comments
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky
For the built-in flash it does pretty much what stofen omnibouncer does for a shoe-mounted one - but for a fraction of the price:-) I was surprised myself - only a few shots showed some red-eye hint, but even in those it was barely noticeable. And most of the images came out pretty clean red-eye wise.
Cheers!
Back in the day people were doing experiments on the human vision system, they decided to stick ping-pong balls over peoples eyes... *To diffuse the light input to remove edges*. It turns out if you do this you utterly stuff the vision system and it depends on edge-contrast enhancement and goes to great lengths to maintain this. So if you stick a ping-pong ball over their eyes their vision reduces to a grey blob.
I'm ammused that the reverse is now applied to camera light sources.
Just think about those poor people with ping-pong balls over their eyes next time you do it
Luke
SmugSoftware: www.smugtools.com
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
I read about such (and other) experiments with vision-mind thingie. Amazing thing it is.
Cheers!
Yean, unfortunately 20D's flash unit is not shaped as 7x7's or 828's were. I used it without the tape (I added tape later when I came home), but it showed a high tendency to slip..
Cheers!