DIY ringlight photography

DIY Photography shows how to use a computer monitor and a piece of cardboard with holes cut in a circular pattern as a cheap ringlight. Here's a Flickr set of neat photos taken with the ringlight. Link

[#1 posted by Anonymous , October 9, 2007 4:09 PM]

Just and idea, but someone more skilled that I could write a program to generate this pattern on the monitor. And it could adjust for color, brightness, shape.....

[#2 posted by qubex , October 9, 2007 4:20 PM]

Cheap is not always better. Considering that the "backlight" in this example is a 24" Mac Studio display, I would say far from cheap. The size of the holes will need to decrease as the size of your monitor does which decreases available light.

Not to mention you are tethered to your monitor, which is tethered to (best case for portability) a laptop. A good idea but totally impractical for almost anything.

A much better DIY project for interesting lighting effects is a softbox. There are a ton of links for this stuff on Google.

[#3 posted by Anonymous , October 9, 2007 4:50 PM]

Why wouldn't you just load the black and white image in PhotoShop and switch it to fullscreen?!?! Why on earth would you cut out a physical mask and place it on the screen? This is the computer equivalent of someone saying, "Where are my glasses?", and you pointing out that they are on their head...

[#4 posted by noen , October 9, 2007 5:59 PM]

You could also make some of the circles different colors. Warm or cool, whatever you wanted in order to achieve a desired effect.

[#5 posted by OM , October 9, 2007 6:55 PM]

...#3 asks the following:

"Why wouldn't you just load the black and white image in PhotoShop and switch it to fullscreen?!?! Why on earth would you cut out a physical mask and place it on the screen?"

...Here's the shocker: even though the monitor may show black, believe it or not it still actually shows some light. There's still a minor amount of light being emitted through the phosphors in most tube-based monitors. VERY minor, but still enough there that if your camera and/or your eye happens to be sensitive enough, you'll see something. You can reduce this by dropping the brightness and tweaking with the contrast, but in this particular case when you add the white circles, there'll still be a good amount of "bleed" from the white into the black.

...The wildest example of this was when I worked at that Big Computer Company with the Little Name that has mass layoffs for bogus reasons. The monitor eval guys had an entire large room full of about two hundred monitors, all running 24/7 waiting for the things to melt as the room got hotter. The room had no windows - on the walls, mind you - and one of the wild things they showed me was what happened when they were all loaded with totally black backgrounds and the lights in the room were turned off. With the power LEDs taped over with electrical tape, if you let your eyes adjust for about 10 minutes, you found there was just enough light to make out where the racks were and walt from one end of the lab to the other without stumbling over anything!

[#6 posted by Dirk , October 10, 2007 6:15 AM]

Ths s wk ss DY prjct.

[#7 posted by nex , October 10, 2007 11:00 AM]

'd xpln why ths d s vry stpd, bt dn't knw whr t bgn ;->

[#8 posted by cyenobite , October 10, 2007 1:49 PM]

This doesn't make sense to me at. The purpose of a ring light is usually for "macro" photography where you can't get a flash close to your subject unless it's on the lens itself.
This is just using a light source that's behind the camera. You could remove the circles and get the same exact effect (using various brightness controls from your monitor). This could also be used from any other light source larger than the camera itself.
Kinda interesting effect, but it's not a substitute for a ring light. (imho).