DIY Frames for Modifiers

I sort-of went off yesterday on the general crappiness of using shoplights for portrait and glamour photography. In that rant, however, I made a side remark ("side" not "snide") about DIY or Do It Yourself modifiers.

Today, wouldn't ya know it, I stopped by the often-informative Aaaarrrggggg! site and there was an update with a link to a really cool, downloadable, Adobe PDF book on making all kinds of useful modifiers out of PVC. (At least, the frames for modifiers.) It's called the "Tinker Tubes" book and it's extremely helpful and informative for anyone who wants to MacGuyver some PVC lighting gear together. Check it out. Heck, you might even be able to control some unwieldy shop lights with some "The Tinker Tubes" book's designs!

I already have a DIY frame that I use as a reflector panel. (Shown below.) It's about 6' high by 3' wide and I put it together for use with some white, reflective material that I picked up somewhere. The material, which is some kind of vinyl or polyester or something like that, already had these elastic thingies at the corners so it slips right over the corners of my very low-tech frame. The whole thing weighs practically nothing so I can easily move it in for some gentle reflective fill whenever I need it. I can also blow some light directly through it if I need more fill then I can get out of bouncing it in from one of the other lights. (Which might be serving more than one purpose.)



That's Kelle at the top of this post. Kelle is another model I shot at the Tera P. shoot last week. Kelle is Welsh, not that that matters. She's easy to look at and that's mostly what's important to pretty girl shooters.