Dec 27
We here at Fotohacker hope that all of you had a fantastic (insert holiday name here) this year! If Christmas gift giving is your thing, and if you got any gifts that were wrapped with colored cellophane (fancy!) this Christmas, keep the cellophane handy for your strobes. That could be useful as a colored gel for some interesting lighting effects. Just don’t tell anyone that’s what you’re doing… or they’ll think you’ve gone nuts.
You can use an elastic band and wrap it around the head of the flash and bam… you’ve got some new colored lighting. Some of those ribbons could also be interesting gobos for creating patterns, and the shiny wrap can create some awesome effects on the wall if you bounce the light off it like a reflector.
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December 27th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I’ve tried using red and blue wrapping cellophane, and it just didn’t really do the trick — it was very washed out. I was trying to do a nifty colored background. Maybe I was just overpowering it.
December 27th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Depends on the density of the wrapping and on the power of the flash, really. You’ll certainly lose some light when you shoot through a diffused gel like this, and therefore you’ll lose some distance as well.
Try turning the flash to manual and increasing the power output incrementally until you get something that looks good. If it’s pretty shiny, you can also try using it almost like a bounce card or flexifill, which will still color the light - though less dramatically.