To get the effects I want on an upcoming shoot, I decided I wanted to make a grid for my flash gun.
After looking through a series of posts on the subject I figured I would just go at it and see what happens. A grid is a honeycomb based filter which when applied to a flash or strobe distorts and diffuses the light into a pinspot with an almost vignette like drop off on the edges.
Here is how I put my own test subject together!
First of all I got a cardboard box which I measured up to wrap around the head of my flash. This holds the honeycomb together and allows you to attach the grid to your flash head. I measured out 2 inches for the length of the grid itself plus an extra inch to slot onto the flash head.
Measured out and scored card
My next task was to create the honeycomb. Most posts will tell you to use either black or white straws. There is some valid logic to this as you will see with my end results and the fact that I went against the grain. As the light passes through the straws it puts a colour cast in, so black will remove this but at the cost of a few stops. White will also not produce a cast but can allow more reflection of the grid housing so try to paint the inside black.
I chose yellow straws. Why? Because I had orange, yellow, peach and bright pink, yellow seemed the most managable colour.
Straws not cut to length. First layer
Using good Ole’ kiddies glue or PVA as some others may know it, I started to paste in the first layer of straws. Once the glue had hardened a little I trimmed them down. After making this time consuming mistake, I then pre cut all the lengths and began to trellace the layers in a zig zag or honeycomb fashion.
Completed honeycomb
I then left it over night to dry. Finally to test it out, I slapped some masking tape across the cardboard join and fired it off. Here is the result.
As you can see the light nicely falls off at the edges. This was shot with a 50mm lens on a D80 at f1.8 1/60. You can see an ever slight colour cast on the left light stand, I think this may actually be of the dirt inside the lamp itself.
After trying out in a few other areas I noticed more and more of the yellow coming up, but it produced an unexpected effect which is quite positive. I found that it gave quite a natural sepia tone to the images.
I will most certainly be making a refined executive model of this for shooting using black straws and quite possible cutting them all to the same length!
