• Build your own macro ring-light
  
• Build a Cheap Ring Flash
  
• Building a Poor Man's Ringflash
  
• DIY a fiber optic ring flash
  
• Ring Flash, Around the Lens Or Around The Subject
  
• Ring flash for camera or microscope
  
• Build your own Ring flash
  

A ring flash, invented by Lester A. Dine, in 1952 originally for use in dental photography, is a circular photographic flash that fits around the lens, especially for use in macro (or close-up) photography. Its most important characteristic is providing even illumination with few shadows visible in the photograph, as the origin of the light is very close to (and surrounds) the optical axis of the lens. Where the subject is often very close to the camera, where the distance from the optical axis of a conventional flash becomes significant. For objects close to the camera, the size of the ring flash is significant and so the light encounters the subject from many angles in the same way that it does with a conventional flash with soft box. This has the effect of further softening any shadows. Ring flashes are also occasionally used in portrait and fashion photography to provide front lighting.

A conventional ring flash usually consists of two parts: a shoe-mount unit mounted on a hot shoe, and a circular flash unit mounted on the front of a lens. Power is supplied by batteries in the shoe-mount unit, and a cord relays the power and control signals to the circular flash unit. Within the circular flash unit, there can be one or more flash tubes, each of which can be turned on or off individually. Some ring flashes have focusing lamps for helping low-light focusing. Ring flash diffusers are also available, which have no light source of their own, but instead mount in front of a conventional flash unit and transmit the light to a ring-shaped diffuser at the front of the lens.

See also

• Flash
• Close-up
• Macro photography

External links

• DIY RingFlash

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