Hi. It’s Roy again, the Pixel Guy. I wanted to do a quick video demo and share with you what I’ve done in regards to diffusing my light on my Macro Twin Lite, the MT-24EX from Canon. Nikon has a similar model but it’s a wireless model, but it acts the same.
This spring, I picked a used from BNH MT-24EX. I got it for it still, I think anyway, and I wanted to get a little closer in my macro photography so I picked up some extension tubes from Kymco, and I think it’s a good step to go through the Kymco tubes before moving on to something like the NPE 65, 1 to 5 times macro lens which I hope to have soon.
So anyhow, with the MT-24EX, we got two flash draw pads here that can rotate. It mounts on to the end of the lens. I’ll do a demo here on the camera. Of course, these also can tilt up and down this way and also like this. What I have mounted on here though, John Dylantec on Flickr and Fabrino Forums recommended these and I really liked these risers just simply because they also raised to flash it up a little bit for the use of these diffusing cups that I’ll explain later on.
Okay. Now, I’ll get into what I’ve done to diffuse the light here. One thing you’ll learn when you first get this Macro Twin Lite is that it’s just almost like a point and shoot flash. The point shoot cameras, the flash on them are very small, very strong, very concentrated harsh beam of light coming out of that device. So then I decided—you know what, how can I make a cup, so to speak, to increase the surface area of the light emitting, not too much, but more than what you see here? What could I use? I started brainstorming and I was changing oil one day in the old ball though and the oil I had for that oil change was this Castrol, high mileage, 10W40. And I looked at this and I though, “Wow. Maybe the top of this might be a good cup to mount around this.” So to make the long story short, I took some case cutters and cut right at this line here all the way around, and essentially cut it off like such. The neck, I cut off and I made these tabs as you see here on this cup. Of course before I did any cutting and modification, I used some liquid dish soap and cleaned out all the oil and that’s what I did. I made a cup. I cut out the neck here and the cap, I made these tabs by using some side cutters, drilled a hole in these tabs so I could loop some rubber bands through it. Trial and error, I kept testing the fit more and more and more and more, and you can kind of see the way it’s going to fit in there and that’s exactly how it fits.
Now inside of this, you can’t see very easily but I actually have reflective foil tape all inside of there. Now on the front, I used the trustee cutting mat diffusing material, at least on this cup. For the other one, I used this umbrella material to diffuse and I diffused some materials, so I really haven’t found exactly what I like right now, although maybe what I have right now is ideal. I wanted to share with you guys, I found another product at a local HEB here in Central Texas. HEB is a grocery supermarket. Flexible cutting board from good cook, it actually comes with two sheets of this stuff. And I think that this is ideal material. I kind of give you an idea here. This is an ideal material, easy to work with, there are two large sheets here, probably 12” x 16” long and there are two sheets inches in this and it was $4.
Now here is the other one. I already said that I used some Velcro and some adhesive glue to hold that on. Now, I’ll just demonstrate how this goes on. This isn’t an elegant egress I guess or dawning of this flash hood. So you could see how this is going to stay really nicely here. You’re going to put a few rubber bands here and there just to make it look nice and ugly and McGyver like, whatever. Who cares what it looks like. You’re going to take good macro shots, that’s what you’re going to do.
Now, if you also look at the profile here, check this out. See how there’s more surface area over to this side, so what I’ve decided to do is do the same over here. So I get more surface area over here and less here and I’m going to do the same over on this side, so it has to be over here.
So I’m getting a little more surface area. Here is the golden thing about this. Proof and the pudding right here. You could see that, I’m sure. There is the surface area of the light emitting from that flashing, here is the new surface area that I’ve created. Now, you might want to ask, how is this performed? Does it get in the way of the lens? I think someone has to put that on forums. So it’s not that. With this Kaiser raiser here, I can bring this back, pop this down and that’s perfectly fine. Do you see that? That’s perfectly fine. And then for less than 1 to 1, I bring it up, bring that back down, loosen this up—I mean, you can bring it all the way down. Check that out. You’re still all the way down with the Kaiser, that is. There you go, do you see that? Check that out. At not to this point and I’ve taken a lot of shots with this rig and had any flare issues. None whatsoever.
So there you have it. Let me show it mounted on the camera. Alright, here it is mounted on the camera. I’ve adjusted the macro to just 100 millimeters on the camera right now. And here we are in use.
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