Old Dog Photography

As far as I’m aware, all DSLRs have a built-in flash — and from what I can tell, these flashes all pretty much stink. Sure, a built-in flash is handy — there’s nothing extra to carry, the flash is always with the camera, there’s nothing to lose or forget at home.

But if you’ve used a DSLR for long, you know the problems with built-in flash. They’re essentially point sources of light, close to the lens, so they make things look flat and washed out. The color temperature of a built-in flash isn’t always ideal, either, so photographs made with one tend to take on a bluish tinge. This is particularly unflattering for skin tones.

Of course, you’ve got a range of options for dealing with this — depending on how much money you want to spend, and how much additional gear you want to wind up carrying. The most straight-forward approach would be to just buy an external flash. But this can get pricey (as well as complicated, if you want the external flash off your camera somewhere), and it leaves you with a big lump of plastic and silicon to carry around.

Since I pretty much blew my “toy budget” on lenses for my E-510, I decided to take a different tack. In particular, I set out to find a diffuser for my camera’s built-in flash. The idea is that a diffuser spreads out the light from the built-in flash, such that photos taken with the flash won’t look so “flat.” Meanwhile, some diffusers hold filter media, giving you the opportunity to improve the color of the light you’re getting at the same time.

So I started out by buying a LumiQuest diffuser — it’s relatively cheap, folds down small enough to fit in a pocket, and looked like it should help.

(image courtesy LumiQuest)

But I discovered that (at least on my camera) it didn’t diffuse the flash much, and it wasn’t prone to staying on my camera. Part of the problem was that the diffuser seemed to be most comfortable sitting very near the front of the flash — so the light hadn’t “diffused” much by the time it hit the front of the unit.

I wasn’t out a whole lot of money, but I was still disappointed.

So I went out looking for a better diffuser. In the process of doing online research (a.k.a., surfing), I stumbled across a set of instructions for building a diffuser out of free materials. Obviously free is good, particularly when you’re not sure how well something will work.

So anyway, for this design you just start with a clear / frosted 35mm film canister. You can usually still find one for free at camera / photo printing houses, but I dug mine out of a junk drawer at home. Following the instructions in the above link, I trimmed out a rectangular hole for my camera’s flash, and did a test fit. But of course, a 35mm film canister isn’t all that big, so the diffuser is still close to the flash face — on a whim, I introduced a quick modification to the design.

I had some metallic duct tape on hand (essentially really thick aluminum foil with an adhesive backing), so I cut out some strips of this material to use as reflectors inside the film canister diffuser. Seen from the side (with the canister’s cap off), the positioning of everything looks like this:

   

At this point, all that’s left to be done is cutting a slit in the canister’s lid to allow for the use of filter media in the diffuser. As the Instructables writeup spells out, you can get small filter samples for free from a number of vendors. I can’t vouch for anybody but Lee (where I got my freebies), but their samples are sized at 1.5 by 3.5 inches. So I cut out the filter’s slot in the canister lid to fit this width of sample.

For “warming” a flash’s light, a half-cut of CTO (color temperature orange) seems to be the standard prescription. I pulled out the respective sample, trimmed off the end that had the now-torn hole (formerly used to hold the pack of samples together), and added a label since it’ll soon be joined in my gear bag by other filter samples.

Here’s my diffuser now, with the half-cut of CTO in place:

And for comparison, here are images taken with the E-510 — without the diffuser, with the diffuser (note how the shadowed area behind my hand gets filled in), and finally with the diffuser and 1/2 CTO filter (slight improvement in skin tone):

Click on any of these images to embiggen it.

I’ve been told that the heat from a flash can melt (or at least, soften) filter gel, so hopefully my reflected diffuser design will help the filters last longer than they would otherwise. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…