Old Dog Photography

If you’ve ever done macro photography outdoors, you’ve probably run into a common situation — not enough light when you’re working up close.

So since I have an Olympus DSLR, and Oly’s macro light setups are both pretty expensive, I figured I’d try a cheaper approach. I bought an Opteka ring light off eBay (they’re widely advertised for $89), and did some quick tests on it. It’s a pretty straightforward rig — some bright LEDs in a plastic mount that screws onto the filter threads of your lens, with a cable that plugs into the hot shoe mounted battery pack (2xAAA).

What you get (plus some adapter rings)	The ring, lit

The rig I used to check out the ring light was pretty simple — an old Olympus OM lens to screw the ring light to, a stack of books to act as a stand, and some tracing paper taped to a cardboard frame. Toss in a tripod for my camera, and here’s what you have:

So the basic idea was to set all this up in a dark room, turn on the ring light, and photograph its light pattern from the opposite side of the tracing paper. The light’s carton claims it’s good for distances between 3.5″ and 31.5″, so I took images at a number of distances between those extremes:

3.5″	5″	7.5″	10″
15″	20″	25″	30″

You can draw your own conclusions from these images, but if you asked me, I’d have to say that this thing’s capabilities are grossly overstated. Rather than being useable between 3.5″ and 31.5″, its range is really more like 10″ – 20″. It might have helped if the clear plastic covering the front was frosted — at least on the close end of the range.

Anyway, knowing all that, you’ll have to ask yourself whether you’d rather spend $89 (plus shipping) on a marginally-useful light, or just keep the money in your pocket until you’ve scraped enough together to get a unit that actually works (for Oly, that means $450 on Amazon). Personally, I resold this light on Amazon and will be stepping up to the Olympus ring flash just as soon as I can (it’s definitely on my Christmas wish list!).