Ping-pong ball diffuser

Nikolai

Yesterday we attended a little movie-watching party at my friend's place.
I decided to take a few shots. Since I still don't have a decent shoe-mounted flash (saving up for 580EX), and bringing one of my potato-masher 555's was too much of a hassle, I decided to finally try the ping-pong ball diffuser. One of my ping-pong playing friends provided me with a white ball. It took me a couple of minutes to cut out the segment I needed with the kitchen knife/scissors.

Here are a few shots from the party. Nothing spectacular, just a bunch of snapshots, but IMHO way better than a bare flash.

#1. Helen


#2. Kirill


#3. Beth


The rest of the pictures are here: http://nik.smugmug.com/gallery/959567
Canon 20D, EF 28-70L f/2.8. All shot in RAW, at ISO 400, mostly 1/60th x f/4.
Basic ACR sharpening and noise removal, auto levels, some cropping, but no major PP otherwise.

Bottom line: cut-out ping-pong ball (with attached stripe of a scotch tape) now lives in my backpack :thumb

Gotchas: mostly useful for the indoors with the conventional ceiling. Outdoors or in big halls/gyms may simply result to a weaker flash, same as stopping flash power level down without bringing in any bonuses (unless shooting from a very close distance, I'd say 4 ft max)

HTH

David_S85

Been waiting to try that out too. Not a bad idea for under a dollar -- or free. Looks like it works well. Thanks for posting these, Nik.

Nikolai

Thanks, David!

David_S85 wrote:

Been waiting to try that out too. Not a bad idea for under a dollar -- or free. Looks like it works well. Thanks for posting these, Nik.

For the built-in flash it does pretty much what stofen omnibouncer does for a shoe-mounted one - but for a fraction of the price:-) I was surprised myself - only a few shots showed some red-eye hint, but even in those it was barely noticeable. And most of the images came out pretty clean red-eye wise.

Cheers!

luke_church

Nikolai wrote:

For the built-in flash it does pretty much what stofen omnibouncer does for a shoe-mounted one - but for a fraction of the price:-) I was surprised myself - only a few shots showed some red-eye hint, but even in those it was barely noticeable. And most of the images came out pretty clean red-eye wise.

I'm highly ammused.

Back in the day people were doing experiments on the human vision system, they decided to stick ping-pong balls over peoples eyes... *To diffuse the light input to remove edges*. It turns out if you do this you utterly stuff the vision system and it depends on edge-contrast enhancement and goes to great lengths to maintain this. So if you stick a ping-pong ball over their eyes their vision reduces to a grey blob.

I'm ammused that the reverse is now applied to camera light sources.

Just think about those poor people with ping-pong balls over their eyes next time you do it

Luke

rainforest1155

Yeah, that thing works great. Did it a while ago for my 717 too and there the big bonus is that it needs no tape whatsoever - you just put it on and it attaches to the flash without falling off.

Sebastian

Nikolai

Luke,

luke_church wrote:

Just think about those poor people with ping-pong balls over their eyes next time you do it
Luke

:-)

I read about such (and other) experiments with vision-mind thingie. Amazing thing it is.

Cheers!

Nikolai

Sebastian,

rainforest1155 wrote:

Yeah, that thing works great. Did it a while ago for my 717 too and there the big bonus is that it needs no tape whatsoever - you just put it on and it attaches to the flash without falling off.

Sebastian

Yean, unfortunately 20D's flash unit is not shaped as 7x7's or 828's were. I used it without the tape (I added tape later when I came home), but it showed a high tendency to slip..

Cheers!